Donald Trump and the greatest show on earth - Winter, 2016/2017

After eight years of President Barack Obama and the rampant globalization, multiculturalism and ultra-liberalism of his administration, I guess a President Donald Trump was a mathematical inevitability, if not indeed a consequence of supernatural intervention. What happened on the night of November 08, 2016 was a watershed moment in American politics. What happened on the nightof November 08 was essentially an internal mutiny and a popular uprising against the entrenched and utterly corrupttwo-party system in place in the United States. Suddenly, the two century old facade of a political system proclaimed to be the finest in human history was shattered in front of our eyes. Suddenly, globalists (one world order types) who had come to control the American empire in the second half of the 20th century are now in a panic.

Before I continue with the rest of my commentary, I would like to point out that in my opinion there are essentially two main components in assessing Donald Trump's rise to power: The first one is the hard fought presidential campaign which revealed a lot about the entrenched elitist political system in the United States and the second one is the question as to whether or not Donald Trump will do (or rather be allowed to do) the things he promised his supporters during the presidential campaign. These are the two fundamental aspects of the recent presidential race in the United States I want to reflect on in this blog commentary.

The greatest circus/show on earth

As with all presidential contests in the United States, this one was also setup to be a well choreographed show. As it had been for generations before, this presidential race was to be a closed-circuit political contest between professional politicians from the two main political parties representing the American empire. This presidential race was essentially setup to give Hillary Clinton the presidency. Then
came
Trump. Then came chaos. The show soon turned into a global spectacle. No
one in the political establishment in the United States could predict
the groundswell of support the bombastic billionaire from New York City would
garner in a very short period of time, and no one in Washington DC expected a relative outsider like Donald Trump
to burst into their town and ruin their two-ring circus.

Speaking of circuses and shows, more-and-more people are coming to recognize the political system in the United States as just that, a circus and a show. The following televisiondocumentary by Showtime is a pretty good depiction of this year's highly choreographed affair -

All the odds were stacked against the Trump campaign right from the very beginning. Right from the start not only was Donald Trump facing strong opposition from liberals and Democrats but also from conservatives and Republicans; not only was he facing strong opposition from bankers on Wall Street but also from the nation's powerful propaganda organs; not only was he facing strong opposition from non-white, minority groups but also from liberal Jews (a vast majority of American Jewry). At times the Trump campaign faced what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles.This
was the first presidential contest in the United States, perhaps in the
entire world, where the duly nominated presidential candidate of a
major political
party was not only not fully endorsed by members of his party but
viciously attacked by it as well.Frankly, I really didn't think Donald Trumpwould win the contest. But he did. But it wasn't easy or pretty or even democratic.

The Trump campaign, Wikileaks, Project Veritas, some influential right-wing Jews and elements within the Anglo-American establishment itself (as suggested by the involvementof"Brexit" officials and the FBI'sstrange behavior just days before the elections) put up a gargantuan fight and Middle America responded en masse.Speaking of Donald Trump's influential backers and Middle America -

As we can see from Donald Trump's controversial political strategist's quote, merely two years into Barack Obama's presidency the United States was already lookingripe for a major political shakeup. Reading the quote the reader can clearly see that those behind Donald Trump's rapid rise to power in Washington DC already knew some years ago what needed to be doneand the kind of person that could do it. It is now apparent that Donald Trump was precisely that person influential elements within the United States were desperately looking for.With the United States ready for a political makeover, Trump's presidential campaign hit a raw nerve soon after its commencement. Sidelined for many decades, Americans of the of the country's "Heartland" had suddenly found a reassuring voice in Donald Trump. After years of being shunned and maligned, here was someone speaking their language and he was doing so in a manner they readily understood and, needless to say, fully appreciated. Presidential candidate Donald Trump was publicly and angrily talking about things most American politicians would not dare talk about in public. What hewas essentially doing was expressing in public what was on the minds of tens-of-millions of disgruntled,White Americans across the United States. Trump was giving a very prominent voice to a very major yet literally dyingconstituency in the country. It worked. Middle America responded in large numbers to presidential candidate Trump's call to "make America great again".It now feels very surreal saying the words, President Trump.

In the end,although about three million more votes were actually cast for Hillary Clinton- which was somewhat to be expected because American society has become increasingly liberal, increasingly feminist, increasingly homosexual, increasingly immigrant, increasingly non-White and increasingly non-Christian -the Electoral College, albeit not very "democratic" in nature, worked exactly as it was meant to by the nation's founding fathers.Simply put: The Electoral College was designed to give the nation's sparsely populated, ruralstates some degree of political voice because the bulk of the voting constituency in the United States has historically been concentrated in the nation's more populatedcoastal states.Becausethe nation's rapidly growing liberal, immigrant and minority demographics today are also concentrated along the nation's coastal states, I predict there will be a fight in coming years to do away with the Electoral College system. So, in a sense, Donald Trump's victory, if it does achieve some of its stated goals, may indeed be the last chance "White America" has to maintain its so-called Whiteness (i.e. European heritage).

In my opinion, what happened on the night of November 08 was indeed a rebellion, an uprising and, in my opinion, also an internal mutiny.What we saw on November 08 was no doubt a revolution and at its core, this revolution was representedby America's White, Christian, native born, conservative, rural and working-class demographics-an erstwhile dominant constituency in the United States and one that has been maligned and ignored in recent decades by the political establishment in Washington DC. This demographic group, concentrated mainly in the American Heartland, has now risen to the occasion and observers are taking note. After eight years of Barack Obama and liberalism gone wild, the deplorables have risen and Whites have lashed out.

From the very start this year's presidential elections in the United States had very high expectations especially in the
category of entertainment and suspense. Saying it surpassed all expectations would be a gross understatement. This year's presidential
elections more than lived up to its reputation as the greatest show on
earth.I may be wrong but I have also felt a very strong sense of destiny in the air, as if Donald Trump's political saga waspreordained by higher powers. Mainstream political observers also seem to be feeling similarly. Are there higher powers attempting to put the United States on the straight-and-narrow path? Does Donald Trump's political victory have esoteric underpinnings? I have no way of knowing any of this for sure but his victory
did remind me of the following passage I had read in a book some years ago -

Only time will have the answers to these questions. For now, we the people can only hope.

For many years I have been hoping for the downsizing of the American empire not only because I wanted Washington DC to stop its crimes against humanity but also because I wanted to see the survival of the United States itself. The American empire has become toodecadent. The American empire has become too violent. The American empire has become too unsustainable. The American empire needs a downsizing. Donald Trump's victory has been the first glimmer of hope I have felt in this regard in my lifetime. I hope to see this new phase in American politics finally usher in a period of wisdom, humility and reflection. Such a thing may or may not yet happen, as the signs from the Trump camp have been mixed, but there is now at least an atmosphere of hope. One thing, however, that has stood-out most about President-elect Donald Trump has been his steadfast refusal to go along with the establishment's attacks against President Putin and theRussian government. I must also add that Rex Tillerson's nomination for Secretary of State, at least ostensibly, is a positive development in this regard, but there is still some ways to go before he is officially appointed. Nevertheless, I, like President Putin, want to see the development of better relations between Russia and the United States -

If a Trump administration does nothing else but improve
Russian-American relations, that would be good enough for me because
better Russian-American relations is crucially important for global
peace. Needless to say, better Russian-American relations can also be very beneficial for Armenia.

Flaws of the American political system now showing

Throughoutmuch of the 20th century the many flaws of American democracy lay hidden behind the perception that something much worst existed overseas. For Americans, the existence of totalitarian powers such as Nazi Germany, Communist China and the Soviet Union confirmed this belief. As long as dictatorial regimesand communist governments existed around the world, the American political system enjoyed a feeling of supremacy. As long as there were backward peoples and bountiful landsto exploit, their capitalism would continue to work. As long as parts of the world burned, the Anglo-American world felt secure in their blissful isolation. As long as the United States was the biggest bully on the block, Americans felt like global hegemons. As long as Joe on Main Street had a steady job, weekend sports to watch on his television set and a cold six-pack of beer at his disposal, the political charade in the United States would continue indefinitely.

With the rise of Russia and China in recent years, the Uncle Sam understands that it is no longer the only biggest or the baddest bully on the world stage. As recent events in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria have revealed, the United States is no longer a global hegemon. With falling wages and rising unemployment, Americans are now looking around and taking note. What they are seeing is a nation that is rapidly changing for the worst. What they are seeing is a nation where they no longer feel they are a part of, a nation they feel is being sold to the highest bidder by their officials.While Middle America lived well, the corruption in Washington DC did not concern them, essentially because it did not directly affect them. Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, this is changing. Americans on both sides of the political divide are slowly awakening. Proliferationofsocial media and alternative news sources is facilitating this political renaissance, not only in the United States but around the world. Their raising the alarm bells over "fake news" now is essentially about keeping control over the kind of information the country's citizenry is exposed to.

The fundamental worry for the political/financial elite is not that Donald Trump got elected to the presidency but that this election cycle has finally exposed the lies of American democracy and that Americans are finally waking up politically. So, the jig is up as they say in American parlance.Consequently, what we have been seeing lately is a rash of highly critical observations by Americans themselves about
the utter corruption taking place in Washington DC-

The United States has
come a long way from when a group of enlightened men, albeit
Freemasons supported by the king of France, led a nation of farmers to
defeat the British monarchy and commence the American experiment. In recent times, the United States has
come to resemble the powers it had defeated on its rise to global
hegemony: Imperial
Britain, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In a sense, the United
States had become the
monsters is had fought and defeated.What we have in Washington
DC today is a government that has been usurped by big money (which includesinternational donors) and power-hungry individuals willing to blindly serve it. Corruption in American politics has reached profound depths. For many years Americans have been decrying the rise of political corruption in the United States, as I have -

All the flaws of the system was until very recently kept away from the public's
eye. Not only that, they had actually created the perception that the United States was the world's gold
standard when it came to "free and fair" elections and "democratic" governance. This myth has now been shattered.
Perhaps forever. The mask has finally come off. In my opinion, the unmasking began eight years
ago when the nation's financial/political elite got their House Negro into the White House and then began
an earnest push to thoroughly liberalize/globalize American
society. This left tens-of-millions of the White/Christian demographic in the country's heartland angry and disillusioned. From the
perspective of Middle America, the nation's political elite had killed the American Dream and were now gradually transforming the United States into a Third World nation. As far as they were concerned something had to give. Then came Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's presidential candidacy cleverly managed to coalesce and
give direction to the anger that had been building up on Main Street, USA.

When he first appeared in the presidential two-ring circus last year Donald Trump was
expected to be apolitical prop and an eye-catching stage decoration. Quite unexpectedly for all, he instead emerged as the leader of the anti-corruption, anti-establishment, anti-globalist and anti-immigrationmovements that were already brewing in
the country. In response, Republican officials intentionally tried to throw the contest as they
had done back in 2012 when they intentionally failed to make the case against Barack
Obama. It again seemed as if the Republican party would rather see Hillary Clinton, someone the party has supposedly hated since
the 1990s, win the presidency. Therefore, derive your conclusions.The Republican elite in Washington DC had plans other than
what their constituents wanted or what the country needed. As it had been for the past few decades, the political/financial elite in Washington DC had plans other than what was actually good for the United States. Donald Trump's presidential run made all this painfully clear.

Speaking of political observers, I hope Armenians have been watching all this political excitement very carefully. More
specifically, I hope that the assholes of Armenia's "democracy" and
"civic society" movements have been closely observing the utter
corruption and criminality of precisely those who have been directly fundingthem and
encouraging them to foment a revolution in their homeland -

Armenia's Westernizers and Democratizers must now be feeling somewhat uneasy. Their
masters in the Western world have finally been revealed to be a bunch of well-dressed
criminals. Armenian officials are taking note. Many millions of people around the world must now be finding
themselves surprised at the depth and seriousness of societal, economic
and political problems that exists in the United States. But
they shouldn't have been surprised at any of it. There is in fact
nothing new to what has been happening in the United States. If people are
surprised, amazed or shocked at the current state of affairs in the US,
it's simply because they just didn't know American society and the
American political system well enough. The only difference between
now and the past is that in the past America's political problems - its
internal dirty laundry so to speak - was well hidden below the country's expertly
polished political facade. The nation's serious flaws was hidden
underneath a cover of a hype and myth that was expertly crafted by the nation's
political/financial elite via powerful propaganda tools like Hollywood, television programming, educationalcurriculum
and the mainstream news media. In the past, everything in the
United States was tightly controlled. In the past, there was no such
thing as internet, hacking, twitter or social media.

Now, suddenly, the
dirty-stinky laundry of American society and politics is being showcased
for all to see. For this we can only thank Donald Trump, Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Project Veritas and to some extentAmerica's favorite socialist, Bernie
Sanders.The aforementioned essentially shattered the age-long myth of American democracy and in
doing so they also helped liberated tens-of-millions of minds around the world, including that of Americans, from the
psychological bondage of blindly believing in the perceived superiority of the
American political system. Americans have finally begun questioning their government -

All
in all, at least on the surface, Donald Trump's victory was a victory for real American patriots anda symbolic defeat for
the neoliberal, neoconservative, multicultural and globalist agenda in
the country. I hope that the powers that helped put Donald Trump into power will continue their mutiny against the nation's
two-party elite and help bring the United States back to its republican roots.If
the mutineers in question do not pursue what they started to the very end
and truly drain the swamp, Trump's victory will prove to have been in vain. If Trump's
administration does not genuinely try to breakaway from Washington DC's
disastrous policies around the world, his victory will eventually prove
to have been in vain. If Washington DC does not abandon its
collaboration with Zionists, globalists and Islamists,
nothing will change and America's decline will continue unabated. As I
said at the beginning of this commentary, while I have some hope, I am
also ready to be disappointed. The signs from the Trump camp are mixed -

I have always said this and I'll say it again: Presidential elections
in the United States are basically about two interrelated groups of well funded and well connected
people competing for the American empire's control-panels. There has not been
"free and fair" elections in the United Statesfor
generations, if ever. The political system entrenched in the United
States is rigged to be a two-party show and Democrats and Republicans are
consequently two sides of the same coin. In a sense, every four years the
political/financial
elite in the country decide what shirt the sheeple will wear and the sheeple
are given the
"democratic" choice of picking between two colors. Sometimes they are not even given that choice. The political
system in the United States is also like a two-ring circus managed by a ringmaster that the
audience does not get to see. In other words, American presidents are appointed by powerful people to be elected
by the sheeple. American presidents are therefore tasked with being the
spokesmen - or salesmen - for the powerful special interests running the show
behindthescenes. More recently, the United States has come to resemble a multi-national corporation in which the American citizenry is its work
force.

Global elite may be losing control over the United States

The political system in the United States is most certainly
rigged. Theelite that had come to control the nation's political and economic life had crafted
a system that allowed a select few people into their closed-circuit club only if they played by the rules that were set by them. This is why the Democrat party establishment rigged the
elections process against Bernie Sanders and the Republican party
establishment did its best to rig the elections process against
Donald Trump. It's not like Sanders and Trump were total outsiders, but the problem for the ruling establishment was that they were not totally submissive insiders. But then again, it was yet another group of insiders that rose unexpectedly and pushed Donald Trump past the finish line.I
would also like to add that when Donald Trump talks about nationalism, making peace with Russia, shutting down the US
border with Mexico and bring back American businesses from places like
China, he may be cleverly appealing to the average American, but he is
unnerving the country's international elite-

The world's current economic/financial paradigm, with the United States and Britain at its epicenter, was created by secretive and elitist organizations like the three noted in the link above. They made the US Dollar into the world's reserve currency, a move that has proven resilient. They based the Anglo-American economic model on the so-called "growth principal", which is proving unsustainable. They created credit ratings and standards for the world economy, which in reality arepolitically motivated. In other words, when it comes to global trade, economy or finance, they created a vast system where everything is begins in the Anglo-American world and is based on profit and the almightyUS Dollar.

It's this international elite that has wanted to contain/isolate potential competitors like Russia.It's this international elite that created the Federal Reserve. It's this international elite that created the World Trade Organization and theWorld Bank. It's this international elite that created the United Nations. It's this international elite that created theEuropean Union. It's thisinternational elite that convinced
American officials to outsource US industry to China in the early 1970s, basically to groom it against the Soviet Union. It's this international elite that designed the trade agreementNorth American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to create an interdependent North American superstate.It's this international elite that designed Trans-PacificPartnership (TPP) to make Asia-Pacific nations economically dependent on the United States. It's this international elite that has transformed the US from an industrial superpower to a consumer-based service sector economy.It's this international elite that has convinced American officials to wide-open USborders to third world migration in order to continue feeding their economic system with low wage workers. It's this international elite that wants to see the eradication of nationalities and religions from the face of the earth. It's this international elite that wants One World Government -

Americans are losing religion, racial identity and family values not because Americans are decadent but because this ruling elite wants it that way. American industry and
businesses have been
moving to other countries not because American businessmen are stupid
or simply greedy as we are told by the elite's propaganda organs (i.e. mainstream news media) butbecause this
international
elite that controls global commerce and the economic/financial strings of the American empire wants it that way.

This agenda of theirswas started in the early 1970s and it was done for the purpose of economically and financially tethering economies of strategic nations around the world to the north American imperial behemoth they had
created. Once we educate ourselves
about this topic and listen closely to what high ranking
policymakers in the US (not "elected politicians" but appointed senior officials
like Ben Bernanke, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski) have to say about the reasons why American officialshave been outsourcing Americanbusinessesand crafting tradeagreements like NAFTA and TPP, we will begin to understandthat the economic/financial system in place in the United States today has actually very little to do with what's good for the country. The following are some pertinent articles I recently came across that I want to share with my readers -

Reading between-the-lines of the articles I linked to above one can come to the conclusion/realization that trade deals such as NAFTA and TPP are essentially the sacrificing of American interests in the name ofraw capitalism and hegemonic imperialism. By outsourcing
American businesses to countries with low wages and lax business regulations, internationally run
corporations based within the United States continue accumulating immense wealth and make strategically important nations such as China and Mexico dependent on the American
economy for survival. This is
essentially why industrial production in the US has been outsourced and
the
once industrial behemoth that was the US economy has been turned into a
consumer-based service economy. This is why tens-of-millions of people in the world's
wealthiest and most powerful countryare unemployed or underemployed. This is why poverty in the United States is on the rise and the
middle class continues to shrink. This is why the so-called American Dream is dead.

It was the above mentionedinternational elite that had come to control the US during the Cold War period and it was this international elite that had transformed the US into the epicenter of various globalist projects. The US has thus been a catalyst
for globalist agendas - be it economic, be it political, be it financial, be it cultural - since the end of the Second World War. Thishas drastically altered the character of the US and has all but decimated its middle class. Actually, the country's infrastructureis failing also as a result of the ruling elite's aforementioned policies. Allow me to explain in simple terms: While American officialsclaim they do not have the funds to repair the country's failing infrastructure- and boost the country's economy and the middle class in the process by creating millions of well paying jobs throughout the country -they somehow have the funds - $5 TRILLION and counting to be exact - to fight hegemonic wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. While they cry about not having the money to spend on the country, they somehow have the tens-of-billions of dollars to waste. An immense wealth is being stolen, wasted and embezzledin imperial pursuits of grandiose agendas whilethe country itself slowly transforms into a third worldstatus; the country's once famed civil liberties slowly disappear; and the US, once seen as the world's policeman, begins to be seen as "the biggest threat to world peace".

The US economy today, as well as its politics, has less to do
with the interests of the American people per se and more to do with the international elite's desire to
maintain their wealth and global hegemony.The faster Americans (who have been convinced by the ruling elite that a lot of what I have just outlined here is a "conspiracy theory") realizes all this, the faster will they begin to make better sense of what has happened to their country. The good news is that a reawakening of some sort may be taking place. An internal push-back to all this was, at least in part, what the Trump and Brexit phenomenons may have been all about. The following is an American economist's take on this topic -

A reaction against all this - the internal mutiny I referred to above - is essentially what put Donald Trump into the White House. At the end of the day, we don't exactly know who is behind Donald Trump. Some of the "Secret Societies" I referred to above, at least elements within them, may also be among those supporting him from behind-the-scenes. His support may also be coming from an internal palace coup somewhat similar to the FSB-led coup that put Vladimir Putin into power in Russian in the late 1990s. We won't know for sure.

Although much of the public support Donald Trump had was a direct reaction to the above mentioned aspects of American politics, unfortunately, it can also be said that just like all other American presidents before him, Donald Trump was also more-or-less appointed to high office by internal and still somewhat mysterious forces. Like all other presidents before him, a President Trump will therefore have no choice but to fall in-line and do the bidding of his handlers as well. My only hope at this point is that his handlers may prove wiser than what Washington DC has had in recent decades. In other words, I hope that the global elite is losing at least some control over the United States. Believe me, that is no small hope to have.

They are in damage control mode

With the proverbial cat out of the bag, i.e with the corruption of the system now fully exposed, the political establishment in Washington DC is panicking and are currently in damage control mode as a result.Having come to terms with a Trump victory, they are beginning to put a spin on it. Therefore, disregard the lofty talk about the "vibrancy of American democracy" and that
"the system worked even if we don't like its outcome". In reality, the "American political system" imploded in front of our very eyes. There was nothing "democratic" about the presidential elections we all witnessed recently.

Yes, Donald Trump did have the support of tens-of-millions of Americans (although around two million more votes is said to have gone to Hillary Clinton) but his victory on November 08 was no doubt made possible by mysterious groups of people and an internal mutiny.With the lies of American democracy therefore exposed for all to see, the entrenched elite is now seriously panicking.

The country's founding fathers and its political/financial elite thereafter knew very well that democracy - the notion that ignorant masses of a given nation-state can be periodically entrusted with making political and/or economic decisions - would not work, especially for a nation as big, as diverse, as wealthy, as powerful and as influential as the United States. Their plan was to therefore have their subjects simplybelieve that they were participants in the political system. It worked quite well for a very long time. Generations of Americans truly believed they were part of a vibrantdemocratic system.The system in question was essentially based on faith; blind faith to be exact. Then came Donald Trump. Then came laud accusations that the political process in the United States is rigged and therefore undemocratic. And the world was watching. This is why they are panicking -

Mainstream political punditry and government officials in the United States have been emphasizingthe very crucial importance of the American voters' "confidence" in the system.God forbid that the myth of the American political system'sdivinity is shattered and Americans finally begin to question Uncle Sam's moral standing in the world. Thanks to Donald Trump their nightmare has now become reality. All of a sudden the United States no longer looks like a very exceptional country, nor does it look like a global authority, nor does it look like the world's policeman. Perhaps PhilippinePresident Duterte put it best -

The panic they are feeling as a result of how this presidential election went down actually brings up an important matter I want to touch upon. As we all have seen, the political establishment in the United States acknowledges the paramount importance of having the electorate believe that they are part of a healthy political system. American officials acknowledge the strategic importance of positive attitudes and good morale in a country, which means they fully understand the serious dangers of cynicism and political apathy -

In
1969, British historian and aesthetician Sir Kenneth Clark stated the
following: “It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that
kills a civilization. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and
disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs”

A Dutch paper in 2004 called “The Effects of Strategic News on
Political Cynicism, Issue Evaluations, and Policy Support” stated the
following: “A Two-Wave Experiment found that the way the news media
presents the news can cause political cynicism.”

Interestingly, those panicking about the "importance of public confidence" in the United States toady are those who constantly try to destroy public confidence in countries around the world. For many decades Western powers have utilized NGOs, activists and propaganda outlets posing as news agencies to carry-out an information war against targeted societies and indirectly meddle in their internal political affairs. They have done this to sow societal despair and destroy morale in nations that would not submit to Western rule. Through their information war and meddling they would first seek to destroy the targeted society's spirit/morale, after which they would try to subjugate or destroy the body
either through economic sanctions, financial blackmail or, if need be, warfare. Therefore, yes, in any society, confidence in one's government is cruciallyimportant for political stability and self-defense.As we can now clearly see, what Western officials have feared most in their societies is EXACTLY what they have tried their best to export to societies like Armenia, Russia, China and Iran.

Another aspect of their damage control efforts was their accusations that Russian intelligence was behind the email leaks by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. The emails in question was most probably leaked by elements right within the Anglo-American intelligence apparatus. In other words, the emails in question were leaked by insiders, not "hacked" by outsiders. Former US intelligence operatives seem to agree with this assertion. An increasing number of civilian officials think it was an inside job as well. I would guess the Clintonians knew this as well. However, because Russia and President Putin have been vilified for decades by Washingtonians and the country's mainstream news media, it was expedient for the Clinton camp and its backers to instead accuse Moscow of meddling. By accusing the Kremlin,
they automatically createdambiguity and plausible deniability
for
the Clinton camp. For a short while it seemed like a brilliant move.

A day before Julian Assange had announced Wikileaks was going to release thousands of hacked emails which was expected to contain damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her political aides, American officials announced that Russians were behind the email hacking. Needless to say, expecting for a massive information storm to hit them, blaming Moscow was a strategic countermeasure meant to delegitimize and cast doubt on whatever it was that was to be released by Wikileaks. And because the American sheeple has been made to believe that Russians are evil, they werefor the most part believing the spin put out by the Clinton camp and its supporters in Washington DC. Throughout the ordeal they were even suggesting that the hacked emails may have even been doctored by Russian intelligence in order to undermine democracy and disrupt American politics -

Amazingly, after many decades of meddling in Russian and Soviet politics, Washington DC was all of a sudden accusing Moscow of meddling in American politics. And Americans were by-in-large believing it for this is the power of mental conditioning, brainwashing, societal engineering and psy-ops. If Russia is bad and Putin is evil, as Americans were made to believe, they would naturally be suspicious of anything and everything that involves Russia and Putin. To further distract the American public's attention, supporters of the Clinton campaign released audio recordings of sexist comments Donald Trump had made about women over ten years ago. This was yet another diversionary tactic. The Clinton camp must have known for sure that Americans today are so dumbed-down and out-of-touch with reality that they would be distracted by thesaid audio recordingsand simply ignore her emails. It worked as well. All the talk in the country for a while was about Russian meddling and Trump's silly comments. As a result, little attention was given to the Clinton's very damning emails. This all showcased the power of American news media. If news media executives in the United States wanted it they could have made a very big deal of Hillary Clinton's emails because the information disclosed in the leaked emails were truly astonishing. Yet, they didn't do it because they knew the Clinton camp would have had no chance against Donald Trump. The country's powerful mainstream news organizations, including so-called "conservative" ones among them, were therefore directly involved in the conspiracy against Donald Trump as well as the manipulation and deception of American voters themselves.So, what we saw was a clear case of political meddling not by Russia but by the mainstream news organizations in the United States.

Nevertheless, the Kremlin must be greatly enjoying the free publicity the accusations over the emails it has been receiving, for as the American saying goes: There's no such thing as bad publicity. President Putin is clearlyhaving fun with all this, and using the opportunity to highlight US meddling in Russia's internal affairs-

I would also like to put the American news media into a proper context to the reader by pointing out the following fact: It's only a handful of agencies-six that control 90% of the nation's news media - decide what 300 million-plus Americans see, read and hear, and these six operate under the supervision of the CIA. There is no such thing as a "free press" in the United States. Hasn't been at least since the 1970s. Consequently, certain news
items in the United States news press will be hyped-up, certain news items with be falsified, certain news items will be whitewashed,
certain news items will be totally ignored, and all news items will laced with political spin, as deemed appropriate by the CIA.Mainstream news media in
the US is actually in the business of creating an alternative reality.More and more people, including Americans, are beginning to see all this. This is why Russia's RT is among the most popular news organizations in the world today.

Donald Trump versusAmerica's ruling elite

One of the most important things that Donald Trump's recent political saga accomplished was to revealthe extent to which Jews have penetratedand are controlling the political life in the United States.Similar to what they have done with the country's news media, entertainment industry and
its banking and finance, Jews have established a great degree of control over the political landscape in the United States as well.Not only are theyfirmly entrenched in the Democrat party, they also control the Republican party.Not only are they firmly entrenched within the country's liberal movements, they also control the country's conservative movement.

So, regardless of what political side an American may choose to be on, he or she is actually choosing a side that is managed at the very top by American Jewry.

When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy none
of the political pundits or the entrenched establishment men in the country expected him to do so well.
He was supposed to be a stage decoration or an interesting sideshow. Needless to say, he suddenly and quite spectacularly stole the show. It was as if hehad
been waiting and preparing all his life for this moment. He knew
early on in his life that he would one day seek presidential office. I
believe that Donald Trump's presidential bid and his subsequent win was hismanifest
destiny, and it
has proven to be a watershed moment in American history. The United
States will never be the same as a result.

The anti-Trump frenzy had gotten so bad, that Max Boot(who Senator Marco Rubio's "foreign policy adviser" and a well known American imperialist,neoconservative, Council on Foreign Relations member andRussian-born son of Jewish dissidents)went on record to publiclyclaim that he "would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than vote for Donald Trump".

The
Jewish establishment in the US and by extension everyone else within
news media and government in the US remained largely against Donald Trump throughout his presidential campaign.
Consequently, the country's neoliberal establishment (the Jewish-led
left wing) was against him and the country's neoconservative establishment
(the Jewish-led right wing) was against him.
Consequently, most political pundits and news media outlets in the US
(mostly Jewish and/or Jewish owned) have been attacking him incessantlyand viciously, which has continued even after Trump's victory.

Why do we see this unbridled hysteria about a Trump presidency within the Jewish community?In my opinion, because unlike
other presidential candidates who are willingly and enthusiastically
surrendering themselves to the Jewish establishment in the United States, Trump and his backers are seen as independent players merely seeking to cooperate with them. This was very apparent in a talk Trump gave to a room full of influential Republican Jews early in his presidential bid. Listen carefully to his words -

If one had to identify the single eventthat turned the Jewish establishment in the US against Donald Trump, it would have to be this speech. From a Jewish perspective:Trump come across as intelligent, shrewd, aggressive, energetic,
manipulating, patriotic, ambitious, entertaining, controversial,
independent, charismatic, provocative and arrogant. He of course also
had name recognition and he was needless to say very wealthy. The Jewish establishment quickly understood that Trump did not need and, more importantly, did not want financial support from them or from anyone else for that matter. The Jewish establishment also saw that Trump had populistic potential. Millions of enthusiastic and loyal supporters were rallying around him. Trump's message, or rather his message coupled with his aggressive/bombastic attitude, proved very appealing in particularto a very disgruntled White America.Trump
had suddenly and quite unexpectedly become a powerful political force, a
movement, in a increasingly polarized nation that was utterly disillusioned with Washingtonian politics. Trump had become a powerful voice in a nation put into decline by the ruling establishment in Washington DC and Wall Street. These facts about Trump must have set off alarm bells among the nation's Jewish elite. The feeling among them I suspect was that have of uneasiness, as if they had experienced something similarto all this once before.

Trump's populist persona, his German pedigree, his immense popularity among the nation's Whites and some of his rhetorichas remindedhis Jewish detractors of historic figures like Hitler and Mussolini.From the Jewish perspective: Once a immensely popular public figure like Donald Trump, who has a following of tens-of-millions of White Christians in the country, rises to power in American politics on a nationalistic platform based on anti-establishment, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments... it's a very small leap thereafter to that thing called "antisemitism".

In my humble opinion, the fear Jews seem to have towards Donald Trump is primarily a primordialfear. Consequently, although Trump has gone out of his way to pander to the country's Jewish ruling elite to gain their approval, the Jewish ruling elite instinctually fears that he and his backers are not something they can't directly own or easily
control. Trump will therefore not be trusted by them.

Ultimately, the US is too wealthy, too large, too powerful, too influential in the world, and the ruling elite in the country is too invested in the American empire to simply share power with a populist outsider who is not totally owned or controlled by them.The US is therefore too important because it is a powerful catalyst through which they have been pushing their agendas, including their Zionism, around the world for decades. When it comes to Washington DC and American politicians, the Jewish establishment will therefore seek total domination.

We therefore had a situation in the US recently where there was a presidential
candidate
who was doing his utmost best to work with and from within the political system at hand; a
presidential candidate who was immensely popular throughout the
country; a Republican presidential candidate who was drawing large
numbers of Democrat and independent voters into the Republican party...
but also a Republican presidential candidate that the Republican
establishment (and virtually everyone else in
Washington DC) was vehemently opposed to.Instead of being happy that in the Trump campaign the Republican Party had finally gotten someone that record numbers of American voters are excited about, they were viciously attacking him. It
was an extraordinary day in American history when the Republican
establishment represented by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt
Romney officially set out to subvert the will of the American people-

But what about the will of American voters? What happened to
that wonderful thing called "democracy"? A well known Americansystematically worked his way into the
political system setup by the country's ruling elite, but was being attacked by the same system because he was perceived to be too
independent and too popular?Donald Trump's presidential bid has inadvertently revealed that even within a rigged, tightly controlled two-party system, which is designed to be in essence a closed circuit apparatus, there can be serious problems when a presidential candidate exhibits certain traits (e.g. popularity and independence) that the ruling elite does not like to see in presidential candidates. None of this makes any sense - untilone looks at the bigger picture and realizes who and what controls political life in the US today.

The US has become a showcase for Jews on the left and Jews on the right

What
we are witnessing latelyis birth of a new political paradigmin the US. Once upon a time Anglos (WASPs) exclusively and
jealously ran the country. That is no longer the case today. America's
WASP class has relinquished virtually all power to American-Jews and the
international elite, a network of powerful entities around the world in which Jews play an influential role as well. But American-Jews in particular have achieved near total domination in the US today.

Today, Jews represent the American left (George Soros' neoliberal types), Jews represent the American right (Leon Strauss' neoconservative types). One
side brings you imperial wars, along with "Judaeo-Christian" values, big business and American flags; the other side brings you imperial wars, along with abortions, feminism, multiculturalism, immigrants, welfare state and rainbow flags.Although Jews maintain close ties with their "conservative" shabbos goyim known as "Christian Zionists", they remain much more prolific and proactive in America's left.The US and by extension the Western world has thus become a test-tube and a playground for the Jewish elite. Virtually
all American politicians - both Democrat and Republican - eat from
Jewish hands. Immense amounts of Jewish money finances both sides of the
political spectrum. They do this to have a firm
footing and a say in any given political discourse.

Jewish influence in the US today is so pervasive that when the "right"
fights the "left", what we essentially see is Jewish infighting.We can
clearly see this unique dynamic in modern American politics play out when they
sometimes air their dirty laundry. When disagreements are sometimes observed between the US and Israel, you can bet it's Jewish infighting as well.We see this Jewish divide even with Donald Trump. So, regardless
of what political side you may think you are on, you are actually on their side.Jews are America's new ruling elite, as the following proves -

So, when the time came for AIPACto organize a show of force, all the Shabbos goyim enthusiastically lined-up and one-by-one they got on their knees and begged for mercy. This of course including Donald Trump. In front of thousands of influential Jews, they took turns paying their homage. As the Jewish elite watched, the goyim fought hard to outdo eachother in proving their unconditional allegiance to Jews and the Zionist state. Interestingly, the only candidate that was not present at the gathering was the only ethnic Jew in the bunch. Bernie Sanders obviously did not feel the need to pander to his kind. But in Trump's case, Jews were not impressed nor were they forgiving -

This all affirms that Jews
today are America's kingmakers. Jews today are the Western world's most holy of
holies. Jews have once again managed to become
their host nation's ruling class, a ruling class within which the ruled can only
speak about in whispers. Yet, most dumbed-down and zombified Americans (a direct consequence of post Second World War social engineering they have been subjected to by Jews themselves) are not aware of the Jewish hijacking of US
politics. And those few that are aware won't dare openly speak ill of
it - lest they be branded as haters, racists, anti-Semites and Nazis.

As
the reader can see, Jews therefore have not only captured the nation's
centers of
power, they have also captured the American people's minds. Through the
proliferation of Holocaust propaganda in recent decades, Jews have
succeeded in convincing the ever-naive goyim that it is a great sin to
criticize Jews. Subsequently, the naive goy today wouldn't
think twice about criticizing or attacking "Muslims", "Russians", "Chinese", "Arabs",
"Europeans" or even "Christians"... but God forbid anyone criticizes God's chosen, the Jews.

I
remain convinced that this is
primarily a result of "social engineering" and mental conditioning that
comes from either growing up in a Western nation or in a nation under
Western influence. Through engineering tools like school
curriculum, cinema, music, television programming, print media and news
media, Jews
have succeeded in thoroughly brainwashing the masses. That is actually
how they have traditionally operated. They use cultural levers to
brainwash and/or distract the
masses, they use financial levers to buy officials and subvert
governments. That is how they ruined Russia; that is how they ruined
Germany; that is how they ruined the Middle East; that is how they are
currently ruining the US. Organized Jewry plays a parasitical role in
the human ecology. I say parasitical literally in the biological and ecological senses of the word and
not as anethnic slur.

Consequently, Jews
today represent all that is modern America - in all its glory and gore. Consequently, much
of what the world hates and/or fears about America today - be it its
warmongering, multiculturalism, ultraliberalism, neoliberalism or its neoconservatism - can be traced to American
Judaism. It's
this Jewish nature and character - with its inherent hatred of
Christians, Muslims, Europeans, Russians, Arabs and Persians - that will eventually destroy
the US. The US is already in decline because subservient officials in
Washington DC have been pursuing policies both at home and abroad that are
beneficial to Jews and Israel but detrimental to the US.

Looking at the
American political landscape, I now feel that it's final:To be
considered for high office in America today, you have to be either
fully Jewish, partially Jewish or simply more Jewish than Jewish. And Donald Trump has been taught a dear lesson in Jewology.

There is no democracy in the US

All aspects of politics in the Western world is tightly controlled by its deeply entrenched elite. The so-called democratic processes in places like the United States and the United Kingdom will never therefore be allowed to get outside their clearly defined parameters. Yet, Uncle Sam's greatest strength continues to be is its devilish ability to deceive even the healthiest of minds. Which reminds me of a powerful quote by the great German philosopher Goethe -

"None are more hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free"

Due to the power of propaganda and social engineering, most Americans today continue to think they are a free people. Until very recently, most Americans were still under the
impression that there was a functioning democracy in the US. If you are one of these sad simpletons, I ask you to please wake
up, open your eyes and realize that despite what political party you “decide” to support
in the US, the imperial elite in the US has already decided what kind
of country you will live in. Everything else is just an elaborate show meant to distract fools.So, if the US is not really a democracy, then what is it?

Many scholars actually seethe US as a mix of corporatocracy, plutocracy and oligarchy.
And one glance at the political process in the country is enough to see
that the US is a two party, closed circuit political system under
constant supervision by a handful of powerful groups. The political
system in the US is like a two ring circus carefully managed
by ringmasters the audience does not get to see. And the ringmasters in
question are: The country's Jewish establishment; Council
on Foreign Relations; Trilateral Commission; Pentagon; CIA; the military
industrial complex; international bankers; Wall Street; Federal Reserve;
energy lobby; pharmaceuticals lobby; the insurance lobby.

It should
also be added that always present within the highest levels of the
above mentioned special interests in Washington DC are the international
elite and their secret orders, the exclusive clubs where members of European and American ruling dynasties (old money) get together and essentially plot ways
to preserve their wealth and their power. Some of societies I am
referring to are Freemasonry, Illuminati, Rosicrucians and of course
the more modern Bilderberg group.Then there are organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations that are connected to them in various ways. These groups prove that real power and real wealth in this world continues to be inherited.

There are in fact many exclusive clubs for high society folks in the US and Europe. One such group known as Saint Hubertus
briefly revealed itself recently when Justice Scalia died.
By pointing this out the only thing I am suggesting is that elitist
clubs are real and they are present in the highest echelons of Western
governments. While we have no accurate way of measuring just how influential
they are in politics, they do nevertheless seem omnipresent in centers of power in the Western world. We can see their handiwork when we look at organizations like the United Nations, World Trade Organization and the World Bank; movements such as globalism and socialism; the promotion around the world of climate change awareness, atheism, democracy, planned parenthood, human rights, homosexuality, feminism, GMOs, ecumenism and interracialism.

It is safe to concludethat the international elitein question does yield great power in places like Washington DC, London and Brussels.

Getting back to American democracy, if
the political facade in the US looks a bit more professional or even
somewhat more "democratic" when compared to other nations, it's simply because the US has been slowly
developing and
fine-tuning its closed circuit, twoparty political system for well over two hundred years.Yet at its very core the US is
essentially the same as all other top-heavy, authoritarian governments around the world.

Ultimately,
the US is too wealthy, too powerful, too large and too influential globally to
allow a silly thing called democracy to get in the way. Those who are therefore hoping
that Uncle Sam will one day tighten it's belt, willingly abandon the business of empire (the business it's been in since the Second World War) and begin transforming the US back to being a republic will be disappointed. Once a hegemonic predator gets to live on top of the global food-chain, it becomes virtually impossible for it to live or survive anywhere else. American officials willingly abandoning their imperial ambitionsis like a person willingly quitting a high paying profession on Wall Street to work at McDonald's. It
just won't happen. Those who run the American empire will therefore
never willingly allow the "people" to have a real say in American
politics.Uncle
Sam has therefore evolved quite sophisticated methods to manage and/or
manipulate the people's will during elections without making it look too obvious. These undemocratic practices even have impressive sounding names: "Electoral College", "Super-delegates" and "Gerrymandering". And this is how crazy some of this stuff actually is -

What we have with the above is basically the flowering of "institutionalizedcorruption" in the Western world.Just think: It's not a majority of votes that puts a presidential candidate into the White House but a majority of "delegates"; and the "super-delegates" in the bunch are government insiders that basically work to close the deal and thus ensure the status quo. The system in place essentially makes it more important for presidential candidates to gain a majority of insider support than a majority of the people's votes. These processes are tools that serve to add complex layers to the political system thereby making it susceptible to insider manipulation and control. These are the tools with which they cleverly control the people's will. This is how they oversee, manage and direct the nation's political process. This is how the system is rigged and whyAmerican politics will never be allowed to get out of its predetermined parameters. It's a very dazzling, foolproof and tightly controlled political system, but obviously not every democratic. The American political system was indeed founded by geniuses!

We therefore had a situation in the recent presidential race where Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were more-or-less even in actual votes during the Democrat party primary, but in the "super-delegate" count (which is the number that counts) Clinton was leading Sanders by several hundred points. Therefore, the two presidential candidates of the Democrat party were more-or-less
even in number of votes they had gotten from the voters, but the
one that had "insider" support was way ahead in the delegate count. And that's not all, people from influential "insider groups" such as the Council on Foreign Relations regularly vet and "consult" presidential candidates -

As the reader can clearly see with all this, the
US is actually a top-heavy, semi-authoritariandemocracy
in which the ruling establishment tightly controls the parameters of the
political system. So, ask yourselves: How is this any different from semi-authoritariandemocracies of Russia and Iran, or even Armenia for that matter?

Iran has a democracy in which the country's religious establishment tightly controls the parameters of the country's political system. The clerics in Tehran vet the political players, define boundaries of the political process and go on to administer it all from above. Cuba also has a democracy but one that is tightly controlled by the nation's communist party. Similarly, Russia's FSB closely monitors the country's democratic processthroughout the Russian Federation. This is alldone to keep their respective societies in order and politics in-line with the interests of the respective nations.It's also done to keep out foreign (i.e. Western) meddling.So, how is any of this different from what happens in the US?!

Would Russian or Iranian officials get away with the kind of corruption Washingtonians get away with on a regular basis? Never! In fact, in 2012, Russia hadone of the most orderly and democratic elections in the world, yet the Westwas crying foul. In fact, Iran has had a very well organized election process, but the West has been crying foul.Very well, I accept the notion that Russia, Iran or even Armenia are far from being perfect... but where are Western-funded NGOs decrying the undemocratic processes we are seeing take place throughout the US?At its corethe political system in the US is essentially the same as
the ones we see in other, more authoritarian parts of the world. At the end of the day, the US is too wealthy, too powerful, too large and too influential.
Those who run the American empire will therefore never allow the
"people" to make important political decisions and they will never allow outsiders
like Donald Trump to change the parameters of the game.

I reiterate: If the political facade
in the US looks shinier, more refined, more sophisticated, more developed or more palatable, it's
simply because the US has had an uninterpreted two hundred year
head-start in the game of politics and economics.In my opinion, the US differs from nations like
Russia, Iran and Armenia onlywith the sophistication with which it fools its electorate and keeps the country's political life stable and orderly.

Manipulation of the political process via dirty tricksisnothing new in American politics. But this year's presidential campaigns have brought the flaws and the rampant corruption in the system to the forefront like never before.What we are seeing take place in this year's election process in the US is blatant examples of the deeply rooted institutionalizedcorruption(i.e the kind of corruption that is reserved only for upper echelons of society) in the Western world. The following are some additional materials to ponder -

But, it's all good. I am actually not criticizing the US for not being a democracy. I am not even criticizing the US for being an authoritarian state. The problem with the US is not that it is an authoritarian state or that itlacksdemocracy. The primary problem with the US is itsdestructive imperial pursuits around the world. The problem with the US is also that it portrays itself as a democracy, which has fooled millions of people around the world, which has caused serious political unrest in numerous countries.So, I am not criticizing the US for not being a democracy. Democracy, in its purest form, is a very destructive political process. In fact, the ruling elite in the US knows this very well. They know that
entrusting a nation’s politics to the whims of its ignorant masses is
the surest and fastest way to political and economic ruin, which is why there is no democracy in the US. Democracy's destructive nature is the reason why Western powers have
been using military might and economic sanctions to impose it on nations targeted with either destruction or subjugation. Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya and Ukraine readily come to mind. The American ruling establishmentis very experiencedand very intelligent. I therefore don't blame themfor not wanting real democracy to ruin what they have meticulously created during the past two centuries. My intention here is to therefore break the myth of American democracy and finally allow the sheeple around the world to see
that they have been fooled by savvy wolves in sheep's clothing. When it comes to governance and women, with rare exceptions, I believe top heavy is always better.

Top heavy is better

I do not believe in the silly notion that the ignorant masses are
entitled to make serious political decisions through a voting process,
nor do I think that numerous political parties competing against each other
for power is a healthy thing for any nation, especially for a poor and/or
developing nation like Armenia. Therefore,
as noted above, I do not want to come across as if I'm rejecting the idea of an
elitist system of governmentas an effective form of governance. In
fact, in various degrees, much of the civilized world today is in fact
made up of elitist governments and oligarchies. A political system with few, well
established political players can in fact be very effective if such a system is practiced by a homegrown and nationalistically motivated political and financial elite, and if the citizenry of the aforementioned political system is well conditioned for such participation.The
main problem I have with the political system in the Western world is that is it
not the "democracy" it wants the world to think of it as, and the
US duopoly is unfortunately not even controlled by a homegrown American elite that has the nation's best interests in mind. The
type of democracy prescribed for the developing world by Western
officials today (increasingly at the tip of a bayonet) is inherently flawed and destructive in nature.

I
personally believe in top heavy, nationalistic governments where limited
forms of democracy and regulated forms of capitalism are
practiced.I see
National Socialism and Constitutional Monarchy as the best forms of
government in existence today.

Nationalistic and top heavy governments
are particularly important for peoples without much experience in
statehood (i.e. Armenians) and for peoples with certain nonconforming
cultural/genetic traits (i.e. Armenians). Close
observation of Armenians and Armenian history reveals that Armenians
tend to be by nature fiercely independent, individualistic, egotistical, restless, materialistic, competitive,aggressive, possessive,
suspicious, jealous, clannish, arrogant, intelligent, crafty and
overly ambitious. These unique traits (which lies at the root of Armenian
success outside of Armenia) does not allow Armenians to be easily
governed, especially when the governing is being done by other Armenians.
More importantly, such traits do not encourage sociopolitical stability. Democracy and Armenians will therefore notmix well. Armenians therefore have the need to be ruled by top heavy, authoritarian and nationalistic governments.

Due to its peculiarities as a nation, Russians also havea natural need for authoritarian governments. But, unlike Armenians, Russiansseem to understand this well.More importantly, Russians seem to actually embrace it. The following survey reveals, in my opinion, why Russia remains a powerful nation despite the immense odds stacked against it -

Speaking of Russia: Moscow is increasingly nationalizing its national assets; passing laws to curb unwanted foreign influences; clamping down on rampant corruption; promoting nationalism; encouraging domestic production; increasing funds to rebuild its national infrastructure;increasing funds to rebuild its military; monitoring the activities of its national bank; implementing social care programs and regulating its "free market" economy. This approach to governance is in essence what National Socialism is all about, although Russian officials would never categorized it as such due to the negative connotation the term continues to have as a result of the Second World War and the decades of Anglo-American-Jewish propaganda that followed thereafter. The following three articles from the American news press discusses Russia's transformation into a top heavy, well-armed and Russocentric democracy and a well regulated market economy. But I would like to once again remind the reader to read between-the-lines because these articles are written by Western presstitutes and they are meant to cast a negative light on Russia and its president -

Russian officials have embarked upon a long-term nationalistic and socialisticplanto protect Russia's core national interests and look after the welfare of the Russian people. Russia's natural wealth has been nationalized and Russian businesses and oligarchs are being made to cooperate with the Kremlin. This is National Socialism at its core. With the rise of Donald Trump, will the United States be heading in a similar direction? The early signs suggest it may very well do so.Donald Trump has put "nationalism" back into the American lexicon and his rhetoric about trade and the American economy sounds similar to ideas espoused by National Socialism.

Nevertheless, barring some rare exceptions, mankind
is
bynature incapable of
properly governing itself. This human condition is more pronounced in certain types of peoples (e.g. Armenians, Greeks and Arabs) who have genetic and cultural traits that do not mix well with democratic values. Because of human nature democracy will not work for most for most of the time.Those who control levers of government in the Western world fully
recognize the inherent flaws found in a democratic system.This explains why
Western governments are by design elite-based systems with relatively very few political players. All this is why I am an advocate of political systems where political parties and corporate entities are tightly
regulated and are made to operate under the close supervision of a nation's homegrown
political, financial and military elite. Two such successful forms of governments today are Russia and China.

Free societies shoot to great heights, but they burnout almost as fast. When it comes to governing, top heavy will always be more efficient and therefore longer lasting.

I want my Armenian compatriots to stop their stupidity when it comes to politics in Armenia. Armenians need to wake up and see that corruption is in fact much worst in the US. Armenians need to wake up and see that there is no democracy in the US. Armenians need to wake up and realize that the existence of characters like Paruyr Hayrikyan, Jirayr Sefilian, Raffi Hovanissian, Vartan Oskanian and Levon Petrosyanwithin the political scene in Armenia is ample proof that Armenia is, unfortunately, more democratic than the US. Armenians also need to wake up and realize that the US did not become as wealthy, as developed and as powerful as it has been because of "democracy", "humanitarian values" or "liberalism".

It is troubling for me that
a lot of people are still under the impression that the Western world,
the US in particular, become wealthy and powerful as a result
of democracy and/or liberalism. We must dispel this false notion because
it is misleading millions of people around the world. We must also dispel this flawed mindset because by feeding
the minds of the masses of people yearning for a better life with false notions and poisonous
misconceptions, it is causing serious sociopolitical unrest around the world.Protected
by oceans, the political and financial elite in the United States (Freemasons being prominent among them)took over two
hundreds years to grow the country to what it is today. During that
time period, the United States became a wealthy world power essentially as a result of the
industrial revolution; mass scale enslavement of Africans; the
systematic extermination of native American Indians and the confiscation
their lands which were abundant with natural resources; global wars for plunder; and the total
control over global trade and commodities as a result of such wars.

The
aforementi0ned, coupled with effective governance by very intelligent and
farsighted officials, were the fundamental reasons why the United States reached
historic prominence within the 20th century.

Actually, voting rights for women in the United States did not come about until the 1920s and racial minorities did not get their right to vote until the 1960s. In my opinion, had the United States been
an actual democracy it would not have made it this far or made it this big.Democracy had nothing
to do with the rise of the United States.In fact, it can be argued that "democratic values" such as liberalism, multiculturalism and the resulting loss of traditional/conservative values in the US are the core reasons
why American civilization and by extension European civilization are in decline today.

Who was it gave us the stupid idea that the masses of any given society are
capable of deciding who their nation's leaders should be and how their nation should be run? Who was it that gave us
the stupid idea that the masses are entitled to
a "free and fair" democratic process?Was this cruel fairytale placed into
the heads of the world's sheeple by the world's most corrupt and most blood-drenched criminals in the West?Who gave reptiles in Washington DC the right to
categorize, label, rate or attack nations based on their self-serving perception or
expectation of how government should be practiced in any given nation?

Besides, how
democratic was the United States for the first two hundred years of its
existence? In fact, just how democratic is the United States today?

Recent world events have shown as that the
imposition of democracy on any given society can prove very destructive if not suicidal. Even for developed societies,
unsupervised democracy
can cause stagnation, instability and decline. In a democratic system, a shrewd minority, or a select few special interests, will always manage to co-optgovernment. Governments that for one reason or another risk playing with democracy will either tightly control itor risk being killed by it.

The practice
of democracy
in the Western world is a tightly controlled process by its ruling elite. As Donald Trump found out, the democratic
processes in places like the United States or Great Britain for instance will never be
allowed to get outside of their clearly defined parameters. Actually,
Switzerland and Iceland may be one of the very few nation-states on earth today that
practice the closest/purest forms of democracy.Before the
leadership of any developing country allows their
citizenry to participate in nation's political processes, the political
system in the country first needs to develop well established national
institutions and political parties that are fully subservient to
them. Before a government can
allow its people a limited say in political matters, it also needs a
well conditioned citizenry. Armenia's so-called "political opposition" today as well as the events of March 1, 2008 have clearly
demonstrated that Armenia is at least several decades away
from being able to practice some forms of democracy without the danger of
committing national suicide.In their transitional phases, developing nations need powerful leaders
with courage and vision.
Having said that, however, I hope to see Russians and Armenians eventually begin
moving away from personality-based political parties and
begin supporting ideology-based political movements that operate
under the
umbrella of deeply rooted national institutions. Until that day arrives,
however, people like Russians and Armenians need strongmen in power.Speaking of strong men,Britain's Winston Churchill is said to have once said -

"The best argument against democracy is a fiveminute conversation with the average voter"

What this pudgy war criminal meant with that statement is painfully obvious and it supports my theses that generally speaking mankind is incapable of properly governing itself and that the average citizen of any nation is incapable of understanding politics. In
societies that are highly developed and well established (e.g. US, Germany, Canada, Britain, France, Japan), the democratic process in which the masses are allowed to participate is managed and manipulated to a great degree by the nation's ruling elite through
its system of education, laws and its information media.The democratic process in the Western world is therefore all about social engineering, public relations and the careful management or psychological conditioning of society through mass propaganda.The
following are excellent documentaries that are ultimately related to this topic. Please devote some time and watch them all -

Put aside all their lofty rhetoric and recognize that Western governments arein the business of manipulating public sentiments and conditioning the minds of their subjects in order to make them moremanageable. When it comes to managing the masses, the biggest problem Western governments face is education, for a truly educated populace is a government's worst enemy. Westernersacknowledged this -

"Democracy
cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to
choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education" - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Democracy
is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent
many for appointment by the corrupt few" - George Bernard Shaw

For limited forms of democracy to exist one of the things that it needs is a voting constituency that is well informed. For a people to safely make political decisions via the ballot box they first need to have a good understanding of politics and the world in general. Moreover, limited forms of democracy can be safely practiced in societies that are racially homogeneous and have deeply entrenched national institutions. Needless to say, there aren't many nations today with these qualifications. Societies that are essentially just coming out of the old world and stepping into modernity (a vast majority of nations in the world today), the imposition of democracy and capitalism as per Western expectations and standards will only cause chaos, bloodshed, economic ruin and cultural decay. For nations that are more-or-less just stepping out of the old world (nations such as Russia) or out of centuries of occupation (nations such as Armenia) uncontrolled forms of democracy can prove fatal. Rule by the ignorant masses is no way to develop a newly formed nation. This is why Western powers have been promoting and at times imposing democracy on certain areas of the world.

In fact, there cant be a better argument against the imposition of democracy and capitalism on inexperienced nations than what happened in Armenia and Russia during the 1990s. There can't be a better argument against the imposition of democracy and capitalism on inexperienced nations than what has recently been happening in nations like Ukraine, Iraq, Libya and Syria.Democracy and capitalism has brought utter chaos and destruction to parts of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and Central Asia.

The
kind of democracy being promoted by Western powers around the world in
recent decades – with its system of beliefs known as Free Trade, Open
Society, Westernization or globalization – are for Western powers
today what Christianity was for European powers during the past
one thousand years and what Roman civilization and Hellenism was for them centuries before that: A means of manipulation, subjugation,
exploitation and when needed, destruction.Now, let's see what else Winston Churchill thought about democracy-

"Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

The reader should note here that the quote above is coming from a person that lived in a centuries old Constitutional Monarchy. Besides, have "all the others" really been tried?! National Socialism in Germany and Italy was working well, in fact amazingly well before Western and Jewish interests joined hands to destroy it. Moreover, for some societies like Vietnam, Cuba and Angola, communism worked incredibly well, which is essentially why the main proponent of "democracy" in the world began attacking them as well. In other words,did they give any other form of government a chance to develop or reach maturity forawar criminal who lived in a Constitutional Monarchy to make such a statement?In a certain sense, however, the war criminal who unsurprisingly
went unpunished for his genocidal crimes around the world, was fundamentally right in his conviction.

Democracy, specifically the kind that has been practiced by the
Anglo-American world, is indeed the best way a ruling elite can
fool its subjects into thinking that they are partaking in the political
process.This more-or-less is why Winston Churchill preferred democracy. Basically: Western democracy allows the existence of a very wealthy elite. And as long as a political system has a well entrenched
oligarchy and deeply rooted national institutions, the sheeple of that
political system can be allowed to participate in the semblance of
democracy. This is how Western elite pacify their street. Nevertheless, despite what Churchill believed or
wanted his sheeple to believe, democracy has always been a system where a small handful of clever men manage to attain levers to
control a vast majority of lesser men -

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses" - Henry L. Mencken

What we fundamentally need to understand here is that most of today's most powerful,most
wealthy and most progressive nations got to where they today are
through exploitation (of humanity and mother nature), war and plunder.Undermining nations with notions of democracy, freedom and civilliberties is part of their strategic plan to subjugate nations around the world -

“[The
Dulles brothers] were able to succeed [at regime change] in Iran and
Guatemala because those were democratic societies, they were open
societies. They had free press; there were all kinds of independent
organizations; there were professional groups; there were labor unions;
there were student groups; there were religious organizations. When you
have an open society, it’s very easy for covert operatives to penetrate
that society and corrupt it” - Stephen Kinzer

Having fattened itself for hundreds-of-years at mother nature's and humanity's expense, the Western elite today does not desire any kind of competition on the world stage. Western powers have lived comfortably on top of the world's food-chain for a while. Competition from upstarts like Russia and China therefore endangers their hegemony. Therefore, what better way to undermine or subjugate the competition than by imposing democracy upon them?

In my opinion, similar to how people of a society need training or a license to operate machinery or have a practice, the
very complex and potentially volatile machinery that is the nation-state
today likewise needs to be operated by qualified individuals who truly
appreciate and understands its mechanisms and by those who have a
serious stake in the systems overall well-being. Generally speaking,
those qualified to do this are the highly educated, high level military officials and, unfortunately, the wealthy. That said, let's also be mindful that democracy, prosperity and
political stability are not at all interrelated: They never have
been, they never will be. Westerners know this -

"Democracy
is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a
well-armed lamb contesting the vote" - Benjamin Franklin

"Remember,
democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders
itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide" - John Adams

Democracy may indeed be the worst form of government in existence today. It’s a shame how well-meaning people these days talk about “democracy” as if it’s a magic drug that cures everything. Just take it and you’ll be fine, they tell us. Well, come to think of it, democracy is a drug. But the problem with the drug in question is that it's a very toxic one, one that has hallucinatory and at times deadly side-effects. But as we have seen, the political West (those who do most of the democracy drug peddling around the world, as well as the trafficking of conventional narcotics but that’s another story for another time) is actually far from being an actual democracy. Western official know better than allowing their masses a say in politics. Every single prosperous nation-state in existence today have achieved success through non-democratic processes.How did the “people” live in the elite-based political systems in the US or Britain in the 19th century? There are quite a few literary works about the unspeakable plight of the masses in both countries at the time.

It was only after the rise of communism and socialism in the 20th century that the Western elite felt compelled to begin giving a little back to their people.

Despite their touting, “democracy” or “freedom” has never had much to do with the Western world’s rise to global power and prosperity. We cannot make the mistake of attributing Western power or wealth to democracy. Western powers rose to prominence as a direct consequence of industrialization, war and human exploitation.

The US was founded by a very intelligent group of people who saw themselves as part of an elitist system. The US today continues to be an elite-based system. The US has historically been a nation where the top one percenthas thoroughly dominated the rest of the ninety-nine percent. However, the American citizenry, the ninety-nine percent, has been better managed in recent decades through the provision of bare-essentials (i.e. low paying jobs and government assistance), entertainment (i.e. proliferation of television programing, celebrity worship, cinema and sports) and mind control methods in the form of information control through the mainstream news media and school curriculum.Powerful
national institutions overseeing and sometimes directly guiding the
so-called “democratic process” is exactly how the Western world manages itself.Democracy is not a panacea. Democracy is actually a dangerous drug. Developing nations of the post-Soviet space are in no shape to risk playing with such a toxic drug.A nation cannot afford playing with risky political experiments when the nation is culturally unprepared and politically immature. A nation cannot afford
playing with risky political experiments when it does not have a
democratic tradition or lacks powerful national institutions. A nation
cannot afford playing with risky political experiments while it is still in adevelopmental phase.In their transitional phases, developing nations need patriotic leaders, authoritarian governments and conforming populations. In the meanwhile, may God help protect nations from democracy and all it’s peddlers.

Trump may be too little, too late

After all is said and done, one things remains for sure: President-elect Trump will soon find out that the world he lives in looks very different when viewed from inside the White House. In the
closing paragraph of my blog commentary titled "Donald Trump and the
current state of American politics", I wrote the following passage -

"The American
empire is too large, too powerful, too corrupt and too set in its ways,
and Trump is too little, too late. Trump will not change the system, the
system will more likely change Trump. If Trump gets the Republican
nomination and goes on to beat the witch or the socialist for the
nation's presidency, he will only do so by coming to terms with the
powers that be. There is no other way forward for him - unless he wants
to risk his well being. In my opinion, Trump will not live to see the
White House if he does not fully submit himself to the ruling elite or
at the very least "cut a deal" with them. The last time the US had a
populist leader that really wanted to change things for the better, he
was murdered by his own. I am not suggesting that they may kill Trump.
They won't go that route because it would be too obvious. Besides,
assassinations of high officials by the deep state are reserved as a
drastic measure of last resort, a trump card, pardon the pun. But they do
have other ways to ruin people's lives. In any case, Trump won't risk
anything. He is simply not that type. As we have already seen, he has
already been signalling his strong willingness to work with the
country's Jewish establishment and the military industrial complex. That
in itself is bad enough and nothing good can come out of it. Trump
wants to be part of the ruling establishment, even if the ruling
establishment does not trust him. But if it comes down to it, the ruling
establishment will make a deal with him."

I may be hopeful about a Trump administration but I am under no illusions. If a President Trump ever attempted to be truly independent I believe he would face the risk of assassination. I would like to also point out that his vice-presidential pick is a typical establishment man and he is now one heartbeat away from the presidency. If President Trump does not fall in-line with the political agendas of those who helped him win the presidency, or even if he crosses the line with the side that opposed him, there is virtually a limitless supply of potential "lone-wolf" assailants waiting to carryout the given task. I am pretty sure President-elect Trump knows all this. I am also pretty sure that a President Trump is not the type that would take such risks.Besides, there is now a counter-coup by his opponents -

At best, Donald Trump will be an embattled and a beleaguered president, and his policies will run into one block-after-another. He will not be able to change the system as the system will most probably change him. I'd like to remind the reader that many months before he defeated Hillary Clinton he was already coming to terms with powers that be. There was no other way forward to the White House for him. Even with all the mysterious support the Trump camp had, Donald Trump and his backers would not have lived to see the White House had they not "cut a deal" with those who run the American empire. I personally think that Donald Trump and his backers have come to some kind of an understanding with the ruling elite, even if they continue to publiclyoppose each-other. Consider the following chronology:

I reiterate: The American empire is too large, too wealthy, too powerful, too corrupt and too set in its ways, and even if Donald Trump and company mean well, they may still be too little and too late. At the end of the day, Uncle Sam is too deeply involved in imperial pursuits around the world to simply tighten his belt and rediscover wisdom and humility.Whereas the Clinton camp represented globalist imperial agendas, does Trump's team represent a more conventional approach to American imperialism, one that also recognizes Russia as a potential ally? Eight years ago Barack Obama was a deception.Is Donald Trump also a deception? Perhaps.

Perhaps this is why now that he has been elected he has been reaching out to various servants of the political/financial establishment in Washington DC and New York. Perhaps this is why throughout his presidential campaign he was signalling his desire to work closely with the country's powerful Jewish/Zionist establishment. Perhaps this is why throughout his presidential campaign he was also signalling his desire to work closely with the country's powerful military industrial complex. Nevertheless, what's been particularly worrying about Donald Trump has been his rhetoric about Iran and China.At the end of the day, realpolitik may make a Trump administration come to terms with Russia and the likes of Bashar Assad of Syria - but the Trump camp's approach to matters pertaining to Iran and China in particular are something that should worry everyone.

I have a feeling that Donald Trump's rhetoric is part of a long-term, strategic plan formulated by those behind him. I fear that those who helped put him into power clearly have an agenda that goes beyond domestic matters. They may be trying to reach some sort of a deal with Russia in order to deal more forcefully with Iran and China.

Concerning China: For the past few years we have been seeing a re-vectoring of US relations vis-à-vis Beijing. This has been called “pivot to Asia.” There seems to be some degree or form of departure from what the ruling elite in the Western world had initiated in the 1970s when President Richard Nixon traveled to China. Which begs the question: Has China also grown too powerful in their eyes? Is a Sino-American confrontation therefore a matter of time? Concerning Iran: It is well known that Israel's main strategic concern in the Middle East today is not Turkey, not Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, not Lebanon, not Syria, not ISIS, not Al-Qaeda, not Al-Nusra - but the country of Iran. I'd like to once more point out to the reader that the Anglo-American-Zionist alliance's primal fear is the development of an "Iranian arc" in the region. This fear of theirs is reaching critical levels as a result of Bashar Assad's impending victory in Syria -

It is also well known that keeping regional nations embroiled in never-ending wars and political/economic unrest is also a Zionist strategy of survival in the inhospitable region, if not a matter of expansion -

As soon as the Soviet Union stopped being a factor in the region some twenty-five years ago, they began sowing unrest in the Middle East. With the Soviet Union out of the way, they embarked upon an ambitious plan to redo the map of Middle East. The agenda in question had become increasingly violent in recent years. Consequently, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Syria are now all but destroyed and the rest of the region's Muslim majority nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Once Israel's staunchest opponents, Syria, Iraq and Libya will henceforth pose no serious challenge for Israel, at least not for a generation or two. Much to their dismay, the only nation that has come out of the region's recent turmoil unscathed has been a nuclear capable Iran. What's more, the war in Syria has helped elevate Iran's political stature in the Middle East and increase its military footprint on the Mediterranean Sea.

There is now an Iranian zone of influence stretching from western Afghanistan to the eastern Mediterranean. This Iranian arc of influence will not be tolerated by the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance.

Let's therefore wait and see how the Trump administration (which includes many influential Zionists) will approach matters pertaining to Iran. I think the first real test for him in this regard will be in Syria; and it will come very soon. The bloody conflict there is in its final phase. The strategic city of Aleppo has been liberatedby Syrian, Iranian and Russian forces. Western-backed Islamic militants have been deprived of a major city stronghold and will now be forced to operate in the country's rural interior, where they will be easier to eliminate. I want to add here that the liberation of Aleppo was at least in part made possible by Moscow's rapprochement with Ankara. The Kremlin managed to disarm Ankara's agenda against Bashar Assad's government. Going forward, let's see how the Trump administration will handle Syria. In my opinion, the Trump administration's test after Syria may come by the way of China. So, let's wait and see how a President Trump will also deal with Beijing. Recent developments between Washington DC and Beijing are giving rise to dire predictions -

With President-elect Trump now merely weeks away from the White House, let's continue watching the kind of people he will surround himself with. As I said, some of the signs I'm seeing are worrisome and some are encouraging. Of the worrisome signs, I'm seeing a number of dangerous neoconservative types that were
around during the disastrous Bush II presidency, as well as some typical Wall Street types. Moreover, I'm not very comfortable with the
likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and others in Israel's hard right (including many Zionists inside
the US) being so happy about a Trump presidency. Moreover, the news agency known as "Breitbar" is in reality a Zionist publication and its Stephen
Bannon may prove to be just another "Christian-Zionist". Nothing good can come out of
these kinds of people.I guess what I'm essentially trying to convey to the reader here is that our hate towards one group of dangerous people (e.g. the Clinton camp) should not blind us
to another group of potentially dangerous people.That said, I still remain cautiously optimistic
about a Trump presidency.

In closing, I would like say that in my opinion, the surge of nationalism we are seeing in Europe and the United States recently has evolvedas an indirect consequence of Vladimir Putin's presidency in Russia. The presence of President Putin's Russia on the global stage in recent years, since the summer of 2008 to be exact, has had a very positive if indirect psychological impacton the western society and a very negative impact on imperial/globalist designs of Western powers. President Putin's Russia showed westerners who have been drowning in liberalism, globalism and multiculturalism in recent times that there is another way. And as we saw in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria, President Putin's Russia also managed to successfully check the imperial ambitions of Western powers. In my humble opinion, Europe's rekindling nationalism, Brexit and the very recent election of Donald Trump can be traced back to what was started by the FSB-led internal palace coup that put Vladimir Putin in power back in 2000.President Putin's Russia set theprecedence to today's events some seventeen years ago, and Western powers have been suffering one setback after another ever since. Seventeen years ago, Russia was on the verge of being a failed state. Today, Russia is registering success-after-success aroundthe world -

We are witnessing great changes to the Western global order, the political/financial status quo humanity has had to live with since the Second World War. We may be witnessing the reshuffling/reordering of the declining American empire. As noted above, the first blow against the Anglo-American-Jewish imperial machine came during the summer of 2008 when Russian forces were sent deep into Georgian territory to destroy Georgia's Western armed and financed military after the Western backed dictator Saakashvili assaulted South Ossetia.It's been downhill for the Western alliance ever since. The American empire has now essentially broken up into two major factions: Globalists (Clinton/Obama supporters, minorities, liberals, One World Government types)and nationalists (Trump supporters, American patriots, conservatives, non-interventionists). And what we are currently seeing happen in the United States is these two factionsfighting each other.

This election cycle in the United States, as well as political developments around the world in recent years, may have forever exposed the fairytales that Western officials had comfortably wrapped themselves in for generations. Thiselection cycle has brought many of the fallacies and flaws of the United States to the forefront of public discourse. The man-made hype about American democracy is finally fading. The global community has finally begun to see that the much touted political system in place in the United States was after all more hype than substance. They are now seeing that the "leader of the free world' is not all that different from authoritarian nations around the world. Donald
Trump's political saga showed that one can be a billionaire, a nationally recognized
celebrity, maintain years of close personal relationships with high
level officials, enjoy the support of tens-of-millions of American voters, pander to the powerful Jewish establishment, embrace the military industrial complex and still be viciously attacked and still not have a chance at the presidency had it not been for the support he received from inside the US government and from unnamed groups around the world.

We can now therefore safely conclude that there is in fact no democracy in the United States. And now millions of people around the world have finally seen what individuals like myself have been saying for many years.

As to what a President Trump would do while in office, time will tell. In the past, however, time has taught us to be prepared for letdowns.
Therefore, while we can be hopeful about a new administration in
Washington DC, we also need to be prepared for Trumpian disappointments. While Donald Trump is not a depraved criminal like the
Clintons and their entourage, he is nevertheless still beholden to powerful special interests that still control the empire's control-board in Washington DC. This is basically why Trump has gone
out of his way to pander to Jews/Zionists;
this is why Trump is pandering to the military industrial complex; and this
is why Trump never discusses the Federal Reserve bank.
While a Trump administration is more preferable to a
Clinton administration, the US itself is too deep into its imperial agendas
and American civilization is too steep in its decline to be saved by any
one administration.

So, will President-elect Donald Trump, as he promised, attempt to actually "drain the swamp" and "make America great again"? Chances are he wont. Not because he does not want tobut because he can't. The United States is too deeply involved in empire to retreat from its imperial ambitions and be downsized without the risk of collapse... unless that is, higher powerswant it that way, and Donald Trump may in that case be unwittingly playing a part in it.

Speaking of collapse, this presidential race revealed a great rift that has developed in the United States in recent times. It can be said that their social engineering efforts have not fully succeeded and the country has essentially split into two very different nations. There is an America that is liberal, secular, cosmopolitan, socialist, globalist, Black, Hispanic, Jewish, homosexual, immigrant, interracial, multicultural, feminist, atheist, pro-abortion and anti-gun, and there is an America that is White, Christian, rural, blue collar, patriotic, conservative, pro-gun, anti-abortion, xenophobic and libertarian. These two America's are diametrically opposed to each another, and the two will never be reconciled. Consequently, American society today is fragileand if put under serious strain the country may crack. Seriously tampering with the political and/or economic system in place in the country, despite good intentions, may therefore have serious repercussions. I don't think any presidential administration in Washington DC will be allowed to take such a risk... unless, as I noted above, higher powers want it that way.

The question therefore remains: Will the United States abandon it's imperial pursuits and humbly revert back to being a republic? In my opinion, the answer is, most probably not. Will the American empire re-calibrate or readjust its policies and agendas around the world and makeroom for multipolarity in global governance? Probably yes. Hopefully yes. Donald Trump came at a time when Russian-American relations were at their lowest point since the Cuban missile crisis. If those who put Donald Trump in power truly place their emphasis on fixing America's many domestic problems and in the process at least downsize the country's political and military footprint in the rest of the world, that would be good enough for me. If a Trump administration does nothing else but develop better relations with Moscow, that would be good enough for me as well. Ultimately, time will reveal the real agenda of those behind Donald Trump. At this point, all the rest of us can do is wait and hope. To say that we are living in historic times is to put it very-very mildly.

ArevordiWinter, 2016/2017

***

Trump’s Revolution - Now beware the counter-revolution

Donald Trump has done the unthinkable – unthinkable, that is, to the sneering elites: the “journalists” who have been spending their days snarking at Trump on Twitter, the DC mandarins who disdained him from the beginning, and the foreign policy “experts” who gasped in horror as he challenged the basic premises of the post-World War II international order. And he did it by overcoming a host of the most powerful enemies one could conjure: The Republican Establishment, the Democratic party machine, the Money Power, and a media united in their hatred of him.

That this is a revolution is a bit of an understatement: revolutions are usually national in scope. This is an earthquake that will shake the whole world.

The United States is a global empire, and from the Korean peninsula to the Baltic states, our protectorates are quavering in panic that the system they’ve depended on for over half a century is about to come down. During the election, America’s client states all but formally endorsed Hillary Clinton, and expressed their unmitigated horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency. After all, the GOP candidate pledged to make our allies start paying their own way, a possibility that naturally fills them with dread. And Trump committed the biggest heresy of all by not only openly questioning the continued existence of NATO, but also by asking “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia?”

The Clinton campaign’s response was to do what no presidential candidate has done since the earliest days of the Republic: they accused Trump of being a Russian “puppet.” Former CIA director Mike Morrell, in endorsing Clinton, wrote that Trump is “an unconscious agent” of the Kremlin. In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, D.C., this was not only acceptable: it was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, it no doubt still is. However, out in the real world, it fell flat: no normal American believed that for a minute. Endless articles appeared in the media, linking Trump to the Kremlin: a major piece of “evidence” for the “puppet” theory is that the Trump people pushed to keep a plank calling for arming Ukraine out of the Republican party platform. What the new McCarthyites didn’t understand, however, is that nobody cares about Ukraine, as polls consistently show.

The political class is reeling: how could this have happened?

We’ll doubtless be subjected to endless essays on the subject of who or what is to “blame” for Trump: FBI Director James Comey? The “alt right”? WikiLeaks? Putin?

Their problem is that these people live in a bubble: the conservative writer Mollie Hemingway tweeted the night of the election that “ I was at a small DC dinner several weeks ago where several people said they knew not a single Trump supporter. I was like, ‘I know 100s.’” This evokes the famous Pauline Kael quote, who is reputed to have responded to Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory by saying: “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” Actually, the acerbic film critic didn’t say that, exactly. What she really said was far more telling:

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

This puts it succinctly: the inhabitants of the “special world” of the political class — self-satisfied pundits, self-serving politicians, avaricious hedge fund managers, arrogant academics, less-than-thoughtful thinktankers, politically correct scolds, neoconservative warmongers – couldn’t imagine a world in which Donald Trump could win the White House. They laughed at him when he announced, they sneered at him even as he was winning the primaries, and they unleashed more venom than an army of rattlesnakes when he won the Republican nomination, even as they claimed he was headed for a Goldwater-like defeat. The American ruling class lives in a world entirely separate from that of their subjects: even as the peasants with pitchforks gathered in the shadow of the castle, they never saw the Trumpian revolution coming.

In short, they have no idea why he won because they live on a different planet than the rest of us. And yet the reason for his victory is very simple, and it’s no secret. He stated it clearly and succinctly in a remarkable television ad in the final days of the campaign.

Trump understands that, as I put it in my last column, “The main issue in the world today is globalism versus national sovereignty, and it is playing out in the politics of countries on every continent.” A transnational ruling elite, the types who flock to Davos every year, has arisen that believes it has the right to manipulate the peoples of the world like pawns on a chessboard. These lords of creation engage in “regime change” when a government they don’t like challenges their imperial prerogatives: they move entire populations around as if they were human dust – they manipulate currencies, “manage” the world economy — and woe to those who challenge their rule!

And the epicenter of this global ruling elite is located in Washington, D.C., with the White House as the inner sanctum of the whole rotten system. And now that Fortress of Power has been breached. Thus, the panic of the elites.

Trump rode into office promising that “we’ll get along with everybody” who wants peace with the United States, as he said in his victory speech. He campaigned on a platform of “America First” that his enemies derided as “isolationist” and which was, in reality, simply the foreign policy of the Founders of this country. While his stance on immigration provoked a lot of hostility, I would argue that the real reason for the sheer hatred directed at him by both parties is his foreign policy views – especially his radical condemnation of the Iraq war, in which he not only rightly denounced it as a disaster but also said that we were lied into that war. And he sent a message to the neoconservative authors of that war in his April foreign policy speech sponsored by The National Interest magazine. In outlining a new foreign policy vision for this country, he said:

“I will also look for talented experts with new approaches, and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.’”

As I put it in my column on the subject: “Here he is openly telling the neocons, who have inveigled themselves into every administration since the days of Ronald Reagan, that they will be kicked to the curb if and when he takes the White House.”

Which brings me to an important point: we must hold Trump’s feet to the fire on this pledge. This is the task of those anti-interventionists who supported him – and there are many – as well as those who stood aside. Let our battle cry be heard: no more neocons!

Trump has said that NATO is “obsolete” – and let’s hold him to that evaluation, and its clear implications. The Soviet Union has been dead since 1989. It’s time to put NATO in mothballs. Trump has said Japan and Korea must start providing for their own defense: let’s hold him to that one, too. It’s high time to pull US troops out of South Korea, where they are sitting ducks, and out of Japan as well. The Korean war is over: so is World War II. These countries are wealthy, as Trump has repeatedly pointed out: let them defend themselves.

The Saudis depend on us for their defense: we send them weapons, we train their troops, while they fund terrorism and run one of the nastiest regimes on earth. They’re filthy rich, as Trump has remarked many times: it’s time to cut them loose, too. In short, it’s time to pressure the new President to keep his promises. Because you can be sure, as the sun rises in the West, that the War Party will try to co-opt the new administration, and do everything in their power to make sure that they retain their hegemony over US foreign policy.

We can’t let that happen.

Trump is sincere, but he’s only one man – yes, he’s the President, but even the chief executive of the United States runs up against limitations; I’m talking about not only political limitations but also the power of the “deep State” – the permanent national security bureaucracy that guards it power and agenda jealously. President Trump cannot stand alone against these powerful forces: he needs a mass movement to stand behind him and, if necessary, push him in the right direction.

This is a great victory for our cause, and I can’t help but feel elated. Yet our job won’t get any easier: indeed, in many ways it will get harder. We are up against an enemy that will fight tooth and nail to retain its dominance, and who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. We must be as determined to stop them as they are to resist the revolutionary wave that is lapping at their feet. Yes, the revolution has arrived. But this is no time for complacency. Quite the contrary: we must be prepared for the counter-revolutionary reaction that is already setting in. We must ready ourselves to fight – and win.

A Government Is Seizing Control of Our Election Process, and It Is Not the Russians

There is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day – it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president. (Note: I understand in the minds of the mass media the most important issue in America today is Trump’s crude remarks, but there are indeed real things to be concerned about otherwise.) Here’s how:

Two days before the second presidential debate, the government of the United States officially accused Russia of a hacking campaign aimed at interfering in the U.S. election. In a joint statement, absent any specifics or technical details, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence stated “the recent [hacked email] disclosures… are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts… based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

The statement goes on to detail how only Democratic servers were attacked, meaning the American government is claiming that Russia is trying to throw the election to Donald Trump, plain and simple. It is left unsaid why the Russians would risk cyberwar with the United States to do this, as many have suggested Trump is a neocon in spirit whose loose finger will be on the nuclear button from day one. Clinton is much more of a political realist, comfortable with the business-as-usual of the past eight years that has gone in Russia’s favor in the Ukraine and Syria. She in fact seems like the stable known known, always a preference.

Though the first “Russian” hacks were reported in July, it is only 48 hours before the second presidential debate that the statement was released. It could easily have been held until Monday, there is no national security urgency for this to come out Friday. However, with the timing, Trump, essentially tied with Clinton in the polls, will now spend much of the debate defending himself. Since the statement includes no details, only accusations, it is hard to see how anyone could defend themselves. It would be near-impossible for Trump to come out ahead Sunday night; this is a near-coup.

Despite the certainty with which the US government has accused Russia of trying to influence the election by hacking into secured email servers, the FBI maintains there is no evidence the Russians or anyone else accessed Clinton unsecured, unencrypted email server laden with actual classified materials, including during Clinton’s first trip to Moscow when she sent and received encrypted email over the Internet and WiFi.

In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton broadly speculated that Donald Trump had paid no taxes. Days later, several pages of Trump’s tax returns, documents that had been sought unsuccessfully by the media for over a year, arrive at the New York Times, who front pages a story. In the Vice Presidential debate which followed, Trump’s running mate spent time on the defensive defending his boss’ deductions.

Clinton sent and received classified material on an unsecured, classified server. That violated the most basic rule of information security. She lied about it. She deleted emails and “lost” both the majority of her devices and many, many emails. The FBI and the Department of Justice, ahead of the Democratic nominating convention, found she violated no law. The Department of Justice granted broad immunity to key Clinton staffers, and allowed two of them to destroy their devices. No further investigation will thus be possible.

The State Department aided and abetted Clinton for over four years in hiding her private server, and avoiding her responsibilities under the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act. Only under court order has the Department stopped slow-walking its “review” process to release emails publicly. There has been no investigation.Emails released show a tangle of interests among State Department decisions, the Clinton Foundation and access to Hillary as Secretary of State (“pay for play”). Clinton sought Pentagon and State Department contracts for Chelsea’s friend. There has been no investigation.

The State Department and White House coordinated to “crush” Clinton’s email coverage. If you can add it up any other way than direct interference by the White House, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the intelligence community, it would be interesting to hear how that works. The comments are open to make a benign case for these actions.

As the torrent of Podesta emails from WikiLeaks continues to expose the crimes of the Clinton dynasty, the FBI on Monday, began releasing their own documents. Buried inside 100 pages of heavily redacted interview summaries from the FBI’s investigation into Clinton are a series of allegations that are nothing short of a bombshell — documenting an ultra-secret, high-level group within the government, who were actually referred to as ‘The Shadow Government.”This
Shadow Government has long been kept in the dark realms of conspiracy
theory. However, thanks to these newly released FBI documents, the truth
has now become stranger and even more corrupt than fiction. The
document sheds light on the reason Hillary Clinton has been able to
escape any and all accountability — she was protected by this ‘Shadow
Government.’ According to the document, any Freedom of Information Act
requests, in relation to Clinton, were sent to a secret group for
review.Within
the FBI documents, an unidentified person describes how FOIA requests
having to do with Clinton were routed through these special channels.
“There was a powerful group of very high-ranking STATE officials that
some referred to as ‘The 7th Floor Group’ or ‘The Shadow Government.’
This group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss the FOIA process,
Congressional records, and everything CLINTON-related to
FOIA/Congressional inquiries,” the FBI’s interview summary said.According to a report in CNBC,
that group, according to the summary, argued for a Clinton document
release to be conducted all at once “for coordination purposes” instead
of on a rolling basis as would normally be the case. But the “Shadow
Government” did not get its way, and the agency in charge decided for a
rolling release, the FBI summary said. However,
the summary does not go on to note how many other instances in which
this Shadow Government was called in to protect her highness. Also, as
the Free Thought Project reported last week,
Clinton had help from the FBI, according to a high-level agent who blew
the whistle on what they say was a politically motivated, top-down
decision to not recommend Hillary Clinton face criminal charges for her
mishandling of classified intelligence. As Heavy notes,
a State Department official, Patrick Kennedy, offered a “quid pro quo”
if the FBI would flip at least one email from “classified” to
“unclassified,” so that it could be released to the public in response
to a Freedom of Information Act request. The FBI denies that it acted on any such“quid
pro quo,” which according to the documents would have involved allowing
the FBI to place agents in countries where they previously were
prohibited from doing so — namely Iraq. The FBI also quickly released a
statement denying any such arrangement. On
a separate yet similarly corrupt note, according to CNBC, one claim
from the FBI documents that was receiving attention online was that one
interviewee said there was a “stark difference” between Clinton’s
“obedience to security and diplomatic protocols” and that of former
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Clinton, the interviewee said,
“blatantly” disregarded such protocols, including her frequent refusal
to attend foreign diplomatic functions with the local ambassador.“This
frequently resulted in complaints by ambassadors who were insulted and
embarrassed by this breach of protocol,” the interview summary said,
adding that the subject claimed that “Clinton’s protocol breaches were
well known throughout Diplomatic Security and were ‘abundant.'”When
the FBI is releasing documents that refer to a ‘Shadow Government’ that
protects who will likely be the next president of the United States,
the paradigm is shifting. This willingness to expose their own
corruption likely means one of two things. Either the government is
being more transparent because society is demanding it — or, they know
the people can’t do anything to stop them, so secrecy no longer matters.
Either way, 2016 is quickly becoming the year conspiracy theorists were
proven right.

Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is not about to «go quietly into that good night». On the morning after her surprising and unanticipated defeat at the hands of Republican Party upstart Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, entered the ball room of the art-deco New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan and were both adorned in purple attire. The press immediately noticed the color and asked what it represented. Clinton spokespeople claimed it was to represent the coming together of Democratic «Blue America» and Republican «Red America» into a united purple blend. This statement was a complete ruse as is known by citizens of countries targeted in the past by the vile political operations of international hedge fund tycoon George Soros.

The Clintons, who both have received millions of dollars in campaign
contributions and Clinton Foundation donations from Soros, were, in
fact, helping to launch Soros’s «Purple Revolution» in America. The
Purple Revolution will resist all efforts by the Trump administration to
push back against the globalist policies of the Clintons and soon-to-be
ex-President Barack Obama. The Purple Revolution will also seek to make
the Trump administration a short one through Soros-style street
protests and political disruption. It is doubtful that
President Trump’s aides will advise the new president to carry out a
diversionary criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private email
servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton
Foundation, especially when the nation faces so many other pressing
issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said
he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on
Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin.
President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these
efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump’s most loyal supporters.
America’s globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme
that because so many establishment and entrenched national security and
military «experts» opposed Trump’s candidacy, Trump is «required» to
call on them to join his administration because there are not enough
such «experts» among Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Discredited
neo-conservatives from George W. Bush’s White House, such as Iraq war
co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being mentioned as someone Trump
should have join his National Security Council and other senior
positions. George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker, a
die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump’s
White House team. There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the
advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former
Secretaries of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of
Trump supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national
security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic, and
Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump’s senior- and
middle-level positions. Trump must distance himself from sudden
well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists
and not permit them to infest his administration. If Mrs. Clinton had
won the presidency, an article on the incoming administration would have
read as follows: «Based on the militarism and foreign
adventurism of her term as Secretary of State and her husband Bill
Clinton’s two terms as president, the world is in store for major
American military aggression on multiple fronts around the world.
President-elect Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her desire to
confront Russia militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the
Middle East, on Russia’s very doorstep in eastern Europe, and even
within the borders of the Russian Federation. Mrs. Clinton has dusted
off the long-discredited ‘containment’ policy ushered into effect by
Professor George F. Kennan in the aftermath of World War. Mrs. Clinton’s
administration will likely promote the most strident neo-Cold Warriors
of the Barack Obama administration, including Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a personal
favorite of Clinton». President-elect Trump cannot afford to
permit those who are in the same web as Nuland, Hadley, Bolton, and
others to join his administration where they would metastasize like an
aggressive form of cancer. These individuals would not carry out Trump’s
policies but seek to continue to damage America’s relations with
Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and other nations. Not only must
Trump have to deal with Republican neocons trying to worm their way into
his administration, but he must deal with the attempt by Soros to
disrupt his presidency and the United States with a Purple Revolution
No sooner had Trump been declared the 45th president of the United
States, Soros-funded political operations launched their activities to
disrupt Trump during Obama’s lame-duck period and thereafter. The
swiftness of the Purple Revolution is reminiscent of the speed at which
protesters hit the streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in two Orange
Revolutions sponsored by Soros, one in 2004 and the other, ten years
later, in 2014. As the Clintons were embracing purple in New
York, street demonstrations, some violent, all coordinated by the
Soros-funded Moveon.org and «Black Lives Matter», broke out in New York,
Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Nashville, Cleveland, Washington,
Austin, Seattle, Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha,
San Francisco, and some 200 other cities across the United States.
The Soros-financed Russian singing group «Pussy Riot» released on
YouTube an anti-Trump music video titled «Make America Great Again». The
video went «viral» on the Internet. The video, which is profane and
filled with violent acts, portrays a dystopian Trump presidency.
Following the George Soros/Gene Sharp script to a tee, Pussy Riot member
Nadya Tolokonnikova called for anti-Trump Americans to turn their anger
into art, particularly music and visual art. The use of political
graffiti is a popular Sharp tactic. The street protests and anti-Trump
music and art were the first phase of Soros’s Purple Revolution in
America. President-elect Trump is facing a two-pronged attack
by his opponents. One, led by entrenched neo-con bureaucrats, including
former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director
Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,
and Bush family loyalists are seeking to call the shots on who Trump
appoints to senior national security, intelligence, foreign policy, and
defense positions in his administration. These neo-Cold Warriors are
trying to convince Trump that he must maintain the Obama aggressiveness
and militancy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other
countries. The second front arrayed against Trump is from Soros-funded
political groups and media. This second line of attack is a propaganda
war, utilizing hundreds of anti-Trump newspapers, web sites, and
broadcasters, that will seek to undermine public confidence in the Trump
administration from its outset.

One of Trump’s political advertisements, released just prior to Election Day, stated that George Soros, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein, are all part of «a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities». Soros and his minions immediately and ridiculously attacked the ad as «anti-Semitic». President Trump should be on guard against those who his campaign called out in the ad and their colleagues. Soros’s son, Alexander Soros, called on Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, to publicly disavow Trump. Soros’s tactics not only seek to split apart nations but also families. Trump must be on guard against the current and future machinations of George Soros, including his Purple Revolution.

This is a blatantly politicized "report" that is not supported by any evidence, nor is it supported by the other 16 intelligence agencies. The recent pronouncement by the C.I.A. that Russian hackers intervened in the U.S. presidential election doesn't pass the sniff test--on multiple levels. Let's consider the story on the most basic levels.1. If the report is so "secret," why is it dominating the news flow?

2. Why was the "secret report" released now?

3. What actual forensic evidence is there of intervention? Were voting machines tampered with? Or is this "secret report" just another dose of fact-free "fake news" like The Washington Post's list of 200 "Russian propaganda" websites?

4. The report claims the entire U.S. intelligence community is in agreement on the "proof of Russian intervention on behalf of Trump" story, but then there's this:

"The C.I.A. presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered."

Given that the N.S.A. (National Security Agency) was so secret that its existence was denied for decades, do you really think the NSA is going to go public if it disagrees with the C.I.A.? Given the structure of the Deep State and the intelligence community, "minor disagreements" could well mean complete, total disavowal of the C.I.A.'s report. That this is the reality is suggested by the F.B.I.'s denunciation of the report's evidence-free, sweeping conclusion:

5. The supposed interventions clearly fall under the purview of the NSA. So why is the C.I.A. going public in what is clearly a politicized report intended to influence the public via massive, sustained coverage in the mainstream media?

6. Notice the double standard: so when the U.S. attempts to influence public opinion in other nations, it's OK, but when other nations pursue the same goal, it's not OK?

7. What are we to make of the sustained campaign to elevate "Russian hackers and propaganda" from signal noise to the deciding factor in the U.S. election?

8. Russian hacking and attempts to influence American public opinion are not new. The intelligence agencies tasked with protecting American cyberspace have long identified state-sponsored hacking from Russia and China as major threats. So why, all of a sudden, are we being told the Russians successfully influenced a U.S. election? What changed? What new capabilities did they develop?

9. And most importantly, what evidence is there that Russian efforts affected the election? Were digital fingerprints found on voting machine records? Were payments to American media employees uncovered? Shouldn't statements purported to be "fact" or the "truth" be substantiated beyond "trust us, an agency with a long history of failed intelligence, misinformation and illegal over-reach"?

10. Doesn't it raise alarms that such a momentous accusation is totally devoid of evidence? If you're going public with the conclusion, you have to go public with at least some of the evidence. Here's the media blitz and some skeptical response:

Longtime readers know I have proposed a major divide in the Deep State--the elements of the federal government which don't change regardless of who is in elected office. This includes the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the diplomatic and trade infrastructure, Research and Revelopment, and America's own organs of media "framing" and "placement."

More recently, I wondered if the more progressive elements of the Deep State recognized the dangers to U.S. security posed by the neocons and their candidate, Hillary Clinton, and had decided to undermine her candidacy:

In other words, it's not the Russians who sabotaged Hillary--it's America's own Deep State that undermined her coronation. It wasn't a matter of personalities; it was much more profound than that. It was about the risks posed by the neocon strategies and policies, and just as importantly, the politicization of the intelligence network. And this is precisely what we discern in the C.I.A.'s unprecedented and quite frankly, absurd "secret report:" a blatantly politicized "report" that is not supported by any evidence, nor is it supported by the other 16 intelligence agencies. (Silence doesn't mean approval in this sphere.)

We can now discern the warring camps of the Deep State more clearly. On
the one side is the C.I.A., the mainstream media, and the civilians who
have feasted on wealth and power from their participation in the
neocon's Global Project. On the other side is the Defense Department's
own intelligence agencies (D.I.A. et al.), the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and at
least a few well-placed civilians who recognize the neocon agenda as a
clear and present danger to the security of the nation. From this
perspective, the C.I.A.'s rash, evidence-free "report" is a rear-guard
political action against the winning faction of the Deep State. The Deep
State elements that profited from the neocon agenda were confident that
Hillary's victory would guarantee another eight years of globalist
intervention. Her loss means they are now on the defensive, and like a
cornered, enraged beast, they are lashing out with whatever they have in
hand. This goes a long way in explaining the C.I.A's release of a
painfully threadbare and politicized "report."

The American news media is wildly overplaying Russia’s role in a major email leak. The Democratic National Convention was troubled by chaos and dissent. Donald J. Trump’s request for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to hack Democratic emails was a joke that American pundits simply did not get. Such is the worldview presented by RT, the state-run, Moscow-based international news organization that, this week, found itself in a strange position: covering an American presidential election where Russia is suddenly playing a major role.

The network, formerly known as Russia Today, has long been scrutinized for being a propaganda outlet of sorts for the Putin government, which oversees its finances. But its American arm, which attracts about eight million weekly viewers, has aspired to more mainstream success, hiring a team of on-the-ground journalists and familiar, if past-their-prime, television stars like Larry King and the former MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz.

That balancing act has been strained by Russia’s suspected role in the release of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, a leak widely viewed as an attempt to meddle with the American election process. But the small group of RT journalists in Philadelphia said this week that their only instructions were to find fresh angles in a crowded news marketplace.

“People think, as a reporter for state media, that I have to toe this line, and speak to a narrative all the time,” Lindsay France, the channel’s lead presidential campaign correspondent, said in an interview. Have I ever gotten a phone call that says, ‘You need to cover a story this way or that way’? No,” Ms. France said. She added: “If I had serious dilemmas, I would have left a long time ago.”

Still, RT’s coverage has tended to emphasize a theme of America in disarray. President Obama’s convention speech on Wednesday was notable for being “upstaged by T.P.P. protesters and other noisy audience members,” according to the opening paragraph of an article on the channel’s website. On Friday, its lead story on Hillary Clinton’s climactic address was an item about Bill Clinton being “caught napping” during the remarks. Then there is Mr. Trump, who shocked the American foreign policy establishment by seemingly inviting Mr. Putin to hack the emails of the Democratic leader. RT’s site features a skeptical headline — “MSM Misses Trump’s Joke on Russia & Hillary Emails” — and notes that American news outlets “freaked out.”

“Mainstream media can apparently no longer tell the difference between when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is being bombastic and when he’s joking,” read the article, which ran without a byline, as is the case with other RT articles. (Mr. Trump has said his remarks were sarcastic.) Contacted for this article, representatives from RT issued a lengthy statement from the network’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, who wrote: “There is no special policy for treating any news stories differently when they pertain to Russia.”

But, Ms. Simonyan added, “It is alarming to see the American political and media establishments across the political spectrum painting Russia as the ultimate boogeyman, referring to it exclusively as a menace, a thug, or a dictatorship.”

“The same talking heads never mention the rampant crackdowns by the absolute monarchies, theocracies and ruthless strongmen allied with the U.S.,” Ms. Simonyan added.

RT was founded in 2005 as an arm of a state-owned news conglomerate, RIA Novosti, intended to serve as a counterbalance to coverage by Western media companies. (Current slogan: “Question More.”) RT America, based in Washington, began in 2010, and its site pledges to deliver “stories overlooked by the mainstream media to create news with an edge.”

This week, those stories have focused on dissatisfied supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who were infuriated by the leaked Democratic emails. Mrs. Clinton’s nomination came amid “sharp divisions and mass disappointment of Sanders’s delegates,” the network reported.

Video of skirmishes between protesters and the police in Philadelphia were prominently featured, even though such episodes were relatively rare at a convention that was more peaceful than some observers had expected it to be. Ms. Simonyan, the editor in chief, said that the American news media’s focus on Russia’s presumed role in the leak was overblown.

“There are 10 times as many articles about Russia’s supposed involvement with the DNC emails than there are about what’s actually in the emails,” Ms. Simonyan wrote. “Hypothetical Russia connections are being used by other Americans to discredit a major party’s nominee, and yet Russia’s the one sabotaging the process?”

Ms. France, the correspondent, put it this way: “People call us propaganda. We take a look at what we see every day, and we do something different.” In an interview, Mr. King, the former CNN star who now anchors a prime-time interview show on RT, said that he had never received directions on coverage from the network. He said he was surprised that Russia was now such a dominant focus of the American political conversation.

“I’m almost expecting Putin to come to America to make a speech,” Mr. King said by telephone from Los Angeles. “Obviously, Putin wants Trump to be the president. I’ve never heard that before from a Russian president.”

His biggest concern, Mr. King said, is that Mr. Trump, whom he has known for decades, has so far declined to appear on his show during this election cycle. “Donald Trump is the easiest guy to book in the world,” said Mr. King, who has said he will probably vote for Mrs. Clinton. “He has not responded lately, and I have no reason for it. I’ve always been friends with him, we go back 40 years.” “He keeps saying, ‘next Tuesday, a week from Tuesday,’ ” Mr. King said. “I’m a little disappointed.”

Donald Trump on Monday took one of his first truly important calls as America’s next commander in chief, and Vladimir Putin was on the other end. Mr. Trump told the Russian supreme leader that he seeks a “strong and enduring relationship” with Moscow, per the Kremlin readout. His promised re-reset with Moscow is on track.

Rapprochement starts in Syria, where the president-elect has welcomed U.S.-Russian cooperation against Islamic State. That’s not a departure from current policy, contrary to hysteria on the left. Mr. Trump didn’t forge the de facto alliance with Moscow in Syria; his predecessor did. But to avoid the missteps of the last reset, Mr. Trump would do well to understand the ideological vision that shapes Kremlin strategy.

There is perhaps no better guide to Russian thinking today than the philosopher Alexander Dugin. One of the main “ideologists” behind Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy, Mr. Dugin is an influential intellectual with ties to the Kremlin. He has argued vociferously in favor of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the U.S. Treasury sanctioned him last year over his alleged role in “violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Mr. Trump’s election elated Mr. Dugin. “For us it is joy, it is happiness,” he says in a telephone interview this week. “You must understand that we consider Trump the American Putin.”

Correctly or not, Mr. Dugin views the president-elect as a kindred spirit—a “conservative nationalist” and “realist” who speaks Mr. Putin’s language. “Two realists can better understand each other,” Mr. Dugin says of the two men. By realism Mr. Dugin means a worldview that emphasizes “the sovereignty of nations.” A realist Washington, he says, “will focus on domestic affairs and leave in peace Europe and the Middle East.”

Take Ukraine and Syria. These two trouble spots “don’t enter into the immediate interests of the United States,” he says. The implicit message is that they do implicate Russian interests. A White House willing to concede these areas would find a Russia where “there is no reason for anti-American feeling.”

Perhaps that sounds like music to the ears of some in Mr. Trump’s coterie. But the incoming administration should weigh the price associated with such a deal. Mr. Dugin isn’t asking for an exchange of mutual strategic respect between Washington and Moscow. At stake is America’s political and military supremacy over a liberal international order centuries in the making.

“Liberalism”—by which Mr. Dugin means individual rights and free markets—“is globalist by its very nature.” Since they were first proclaimed by the philosophes of the Enlightenment and their followers in the American colonies, liberal ideas have conquered the globe, and a succession of liberal powers, most recently the U.S., has overseen world order.

Mr. Dugin equates liberalism with moral license and spiritual poverty. “Liberalism is totalitarianism,” he says, an invasive weed that Orthodox Russia, forever poised between East and West, must resist. A U.S. that no longer seeks to uphold liberal order, then, would be a long-brewing triumph for ideas that Mr. Dugin and like-minded thinkers on the nationalist far right in Russia and Europe have championed for decades.

Such a development would represent a passage from “unipolarity to multipolarity,” he says. “All those who reject universalism and globalization have an opening. . . . That is a theological and metaphysical shift, and we underestimate what is going on.” It would be “a real shift in the balance of power.” In his book “The Fourth Political Theory,” Mr. Dugin puts it less delicately: “The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point, it will be.”

Developing structures to replace the old liberal international order is the other half of Mr. Dugin’s philosophical project. In a post-liberal world, he says, the great powers would pursue “regional globalization” instead of “global globalization.” The aim wouldn’t be to resurrect the pure nation-state “as it existed before globalization.”

Instead, there would be “balanced spaces of integration,” with an Anglo-American sphere, a European sphere as well as a Eurasian sphere that encompasses Russia, Shiite Iran and parts of Eastern Europe. If that latter sounds a bit like a sophisticated philosophical alibi for Mr. Putin’s imperial ambitions in the territory between the Baltic and Black Seas, well, it is. But Mr. Dugin says the Eurasian regional integration he envisions needn’t be coercive.

“Eurasianism is a defensive step against a globalization applied by all the power of the U.S.,” he says. But if Washington were to step back, “we can accomplish this more democratically.” And what about the bad memories, in places like Poland and the Baltic States, of the last time Russia “integrated” its neighbors? Mr. Dugin says he’s sympathetic but that these nations must “adapt to multipolarity.”He adds: “There were also good memories.”

Millions of Americans are already waiting for hours outside of
polling places to vote for the next president of the United States. All
of that might not matter though, as some security pros say the entire
election can be rigged all too easily. In one example, it wouldn’t take much more than ten dollars’ worth of
parts from any RadioShack store to steal and manipulate votes. It’s
called a man-in-the-middle attack and the computer program that logs the
results on electronic voting machines isn’t even compromised.

“It’s a classic attack on security devices,” Roger Johnston tells Popular Science. “You
implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the
voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn cheating
on and off. We’re basically interfering with transmitting the voter’s
intent.”

According to the magazine, anyone from a high-school
student to an octogenarian could corrupt the voting process. Johnston
is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National
Laboratory and has done it himself, even on camera. It wouldn’t be hard
for others, he says, and some fear that that could easily be the case on
Election Day. And with many prediction polls estimating a close contest
between President Barack Obama and Republican Party challenger Mitt
Romney this year, it wouldn’t take much to render the entire contest
corrupted.

On the website for
Argonne, Johnston says Americans believe too often that election
officials assume — incorrectly — that it takes a computer genius capable
of a nation-state cyberassault or a frazzled, Hollywood-designed hacker
to turn an electronic voting machine on its head. And while that route
is once that can be taken too, it isn’t the only way to ruin an
election. Insider threats from election officials or anyone with
access to a voting machine could easily alter contests, and monitors
aren’t necessarily on the look-out for that kind of unauthorized access.

“And a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who
are retired, and God bless them, they’re what makes the elections work,
but they’re not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle
security attacks,”

Johnston tells Popular Science. In the example
of hijacking the computer transmission with a few bucks’ worth of
electronics, it wouldn’t require much more than walking into a polling
place and entering a booth with the right knowhow and intent, and most
machines can be access without even requiring a two-dollar lockpick and a
tiny tension bar.

“No one signs for the machines when they show up.
No one’s responsible for watching them. Seals on them aren’t much
different from the anti-tamper packaging found on food and
over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or
drug product: You think that’s challenging?” he asks.

Johnston
has recorded himself demonstrating how a logic analyzer, an Allen
wrench and a screwdriver is all it takes to change votes to register for
one candidate instead of another by using a man-in-the-middle attack.
Although it hasn’t been verified yet, a video posted to YouTube early on
November 6 from an account registered to “Centralpavote” shows what is
reported to be a similar machine showing signs typical of exactly that
kind of abuse —not in a test setting, though, but only hours before the
polls close for real [VIDEO].

This
Election Day, the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by
more than 26 million voters in 20 states, while the push-button Sequoia
AVC machine will be deployed to four states for use by almost 9
million voters. Johnston says purchasing a $10 logic analyzer from
RadioShack is easily enough to snoop and see who any voter intends on
electing, and from there those digital transmissions can be hijacked and
told to mean something else. For experts, though, there are even other
ways to wreak havoc on the polls.

Johnston says the machines
don’t transmit data with encryption, so anyone with a basic
understanding of digital communications can figure out how a user votes
if they’ve accessed the machine with one of those logic analyzers.
Sequoia — the company responsible for making a good share of America’s
electronic voting machines — do encrypt the results of each vote,
though. Well, kind of.

Andrew W. Appel of Princeton, NY bought a
few used AVC Advantage voting machine made by Sequoia off an online
auction site for only $82 just a couple of years ago. Once they arrived,
he accessed the machine’s innards and says it was easy to start to see
how things worked.

“I was surprised at how simple it was for
me to access the ROM memory chips containing the firmware that
controls the vote-counting,” Appel writes on his personal website. Despite claims from Sequoia that the machine wasn’t easily hackable, Appel says,
“The AVC Advantage can be easily manipulated to throw an election
because the chips which control the vote-counting are not soldered on to
the circuit board of the DRE. This means the vote-counting firmware
can be removed and replace with fraudulent firmware.”

In
another study carried out at The University of Iowa in 2003, Douglas W
Jones from the school’s Department of Computer Science found that
any voting machine purchased second-hand — like even those Diebold
machines deployed across a good chunk of America — can also be hacked
with ease.

“It appeared that the security keys for the encryption used by the I-mark software were hard-coded into the voting application,” he found when examining a Diebold Accuvote TS. “As
things stood, their system relied on security through obscurity, so
they must take measures to assure that their code remains obscure and
that no copy of their code ever leaks out into public. I told them that
the moment one of their machines goes to the landfill or is otherwise
disposed of, someone might extract their encryption key and all of their
security claims would become meaningless.”

According to
Jones, even claims made by voting machine companies that their devices
are secure are just that — mere accusations hard for the layperson to
verify without first learning a few things about electronics, encryption
or just how to disassemble the front panel from an electronic voting
machine. Viruses can also be sent to machines, malwares can corrupt code
and nothing sure by pristine, 100 percent out-of-the-box sterility can
assure voters that they aren’t casting ballots on a tampered machine.

“We've
all used ATMs, and most everyone (except my quasi-Luddite self) has
something such as an iPod. Now, have you ever, anytime, anywhere, had
one of these electronic devices switch data input on you?” asks Selwyn Duke of American Thinking in a recent article. “So
how is it that in our high-tech universe of flawlessly functioning
electronic gadgets, voting machines are the only ones prone to
human-like ‘error’? If there's an explanation other than human meddling,
again, I'd truly like to hear it.”

Given the post-election
discussion on fraud, intimidation, chads and corrupted computerized
tally machines that have come with seemingly every political contest in
recent years, explanations — valid or not — are expected to be rampant
following this week’s vote. If history is any indication, though, don’t
expect these things to work themselves out before 2016.

Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002
and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have
been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to
a state report. The AVS WinVote machines, used in three presidential elections in
Virginia, “would get an F-minus” in security, according to a computer
scientist at tech research group SRI International who had pushed for a formal inquiry by the state of Virginia for close to a decade.

In a damning study published Tuesday, the Virginia
Information Technology Agency and outside contractor Pro V&V found
numerous flaws in the system, which had also been used in Mississippi
and Pennsylvania. Jeremy Epstein, of the Menlo Park, California, nonprofit SRI
International, served on a Virginia state legislative commission
investigating the voting machines in 2008. He has been trying to get them decertified ever since. Anyone within a half mile could have modified every vote, undetected, Epstein said in a blog post.
“I got to question a guy by the name of Brit Williams, who’d certified
them, and I said, ‘How did you do a penetration test?’” Epstein told the
Guardian, “and he said, ‘I don’t know how to do something like that’.”

Reached by phone, Williams, who has since retired, said he did not
recall the incident and referred the Guardian to former colleagues at
Kennesaw State University who have taken over the certification duties
he used to perform for Virginia and other states. “You could have broken into one of these with a very small amount of
technical assistance,” Epstein said. “I could teach you how to do it
over the phone. It might require an administrator password, but that’s
okay, the password is ‘admin’.” Bypassing the encrypted WEP wireless system also proved easy. The
password turned out to be “ABCDE”, according to the state’s security
assessment – and getting the password “would take a few minutes and
after that you don’t need any tools at all”, said Epstein.

The
commission that stripped the machines of certification also found that
the version of Windows operating on each of them had not been updated
since at least 2004, that it was possible to “create and execute
malicious code” on the WINVote and that “the level of sophistication to
execute such an attack is low”. The WINVote machine, manufactured by Advanced Voting Solutions, a
now-defunct Texas company, has been under siege by Epstein and others
for years; the units have been used in at least two dozen elections
across the state. Mississippi and Pennsylvania stopped using them
several years ago. Epstein said it is likely no one will ever know
whether or not they were tampered with.

“There are no logs kept in the systems,” Epstein said. “I’ve examined
them.” In order to determine anything about the machines’ histories, in
fact, a very high level of technical sophistication would be required,
on a level with the FBI looking at images of deleted files on a
suspect’s hard drive. “Bottom line is that if no Virginia elections were ever hacked (and
we have no way of knowing if it happened), it’s because no one with even
a modicum of skill tried,” Epstein wrote on his blog.

Cats
vs. dogs. Coke vs. Pepsi. Democrats vs. Republicans. These are the
great divisions of life. But what if one of those rivalries isn’t
actually much of a division at all? Don’t worry, I’m not trying to
reignite the cola wars of the 90s.
(Besides, we all know Coke is the clear winner: Do you order a Jack and
Pepsi?) No, I’m talking about Democrats and Republicans—or rather, the
out-of-date and out-of-step establishments of both parties. For
libertarians, saying both parties are the same is a common theme.
Democrat and Republican partisans dismiss such critiques as cynical or unserious, but there’s a real case to be made if we look at the cold, hard facts.

Here are 7 big reasons there’s no difference between establishment Democrats and Republicans:

1. Both support endless war. It’s been more than a
decade since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America’s
entanglements are far from over. Though Bush is remembered as the
consummate hawk, Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama has used his time in
office to start or maintain additional wars in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen,
and Somalia. Now, he wants to add Syria to the list. My generation can barely remember peace—and there’s no end in sight for a foreign policy with devastating human and financial costs.

2. Both engage in out-of-control spending. Yes,
deficit spending has accelerated under Barack Obama. But you know what?
There was also a massive acceleration under Bush. The fact is, debt is a bipartisan problem, and neither party is innocent. With $17 trillion of debt (and rapidly counting) as the consequence of decades of bipartisan irresponsibility, the time has passed for pointing fingers and dubbing a slightly slower rate of spending growth a “historic cut.”

4. Both have no respect for the rule of law. Obama swept into office promising a new attention to the rule of law after years of (correct) complaints that Bush often ignored it. “I take the Constitution very seriously,” he maintained to a nation weary for lawfulness. Bush and his GOP Congress were rightly critiqued for rampantly flouting the Constitution, especially the 4th and 5th Amendments (rights to privacy and a fair trial). But as Gitmo remains open, the NDAA makes indefinite detention a possibility for any American, and the list of NSA abuses reaches absurd proportions, Obama’s campaign promise is overdue for a death certificate.

5. Both are bought and paid for by big business. You know what’s the best original idea in politics today? Making politicians wear suits like NASCAR drivers, which display their biggest corporate sponsors. Democrats and Republicans alike would be plastered
with logos. So is it any wonder that many of these same businesses get
massive favors from the government at taxpayers’ expense? DC spends
upwards of $100 billion on corporate welfare annually, not to mention huge one-off expenditures like the bailouts.

6. Both care most about their own power. President Obama recently joked,
“That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I
want.” And while he was just kidding around, his humor was in line with
the bipartisan presidential mindset. In the recent State of the Union
address, the President announced
his intention to continue expanding the power of the Executive at
Congress’ expense. Republicans were duly upset at this power grab, but
historically GOP Presidents have actually averaged slightly more executive orders than Democrats have.

7. Both have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty. Finally, take a look at the big picture:

Our government is reading our emails and monitoring our calls. It gropes us at the airport, wants to keep track of our cars, and plans
to subject us to random security sweeps at concerts and train stations.
We can’t decide for ourselves what to consume, whether to buy
insurance, or who to marry. All our income until mid-April goes directly to the government. America has the highest incarceration rate
in the world, and minorities are subject to unfair, disproportionate
punishment. Is this really the land of the free? In 2014, it’s very
difficult to answer that question in the
affirmative. But it’s easy to see that partisanship isn’t the answer—and
neither is bipartisan big government. As America moves toward a new,
liberty-friendly policy consensus, let’s toss this outdated left vs. right rivalry and focus on the real fight: Washington vs. us.

In an increasingly media-driven age, language is everything and
is often used by officialdom to tyrannise meaning. With the deaths of
millions on its hands since 1945, the US has become the world’s number
one terror state. By the 1980s, former CIA man John Stockwell had put
the figure at six million. As a recent article has indicated, from mass
bombing in Southeast Asia to employing death squads in South America,
the US military and the CIA have been directly and indirectly
responsible for an updated figure of an estimated ten million deaths
(1). But it’s not called mass murder these days. Ironically, the US has
hijacked the word ‘terror’ to justify its brand of tyranny through a war on terror.

You can also add to that ten million, countless others whose lives
have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not
rely on the military to bomb peoples and countries into submission, but
on a certain policy. It’s not browbeating. It’s structural adjustment.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have taken their
own lives over the past decade and a half largely as a result of US
agribusiness manipulating global commodity prices courtesy of policies
enacted on its behalf by the US government or due to the corporate
monopoly, or frontier technology, of terminator seeds that also landed farmers in debt which was just too much for them to bear (2).

The plight of Indian farmers is not unique. How many lives have been
cut short across the world because of the inherent structural violence
or silent killing of the everyday seemingly benign functioning of
predatory capitalism? The built-in inequalities of the system have
effectively stolen years from people’s lives, the health from their
bodies, the livelihoods from their hands, the water from their taps and
food from their plates. From the UK to Africa, the subjugated classes –
the now often discarded economic fodder, the cannon fodder during times
of war or the returning heroes to be thrown
overboard by the system on coming home, the people who are to be
manipulated and exploited at will via bogus notions of nationalism or
the national interest – have had their lives
cut short or stripped bare of opportunities due to the hardships imposed
by the iron fist of capitalism (3).

The appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it from
bottom to top via a process of accumulation by dispossession (4) is
celebrated as growth, prosperity, and freedom of choice,
despite evidence that, from Greece to Spain, the reality for the
majority has been increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and
misery. You wouldn’t know much about this if you just used the mainstream
media for information, though. Sure, you may have been told to tighten your belt because we are all in it together and must make some sacrifices in these difficult economic times.

And just for good measure, as much of the country (any country) is
thrown onto the scraphead because it is surplus to requirements now that
their jobs have been outsourced abroad, we simply must attack Mali,
Syria, Libya, Iran (the list goes on) because not to do so would let the
evil-doers take over the world. And then where would we be without such
high-minded notions? It’s not resource plunder. It’s humanitarianism.

Well, we would be precisely where we are right now because the
evil-doers are already in control and waging war not only on the people
of those countries just mentioned, but on the people within their own
countries too via the tools of surveillance, the penal system, the
comotosing effects of spymaster imported illegal drugs or the
infotainment industry and the barrage of legislation that is serving to
strip away civil liberties. The game is up, the dominant Western economy
(the US) is broken beyond repair (5). Imperialism and militarism won’t
save it, but dissent won’t be allowed.

And as private bankers entrap us all even further via their license
to print and loan currencies to national governments then also loan them
the interest on it that spirals out of hand so it can never be paid
back (6), they are able to line their pockets even further by buying up
national assets on the cheap from the countries they bankrupted in the
first place. It’s not racketeering. It’s austerity.

“And now they’re coming for your social security. They
want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to
their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll
get it. They’ll get it all sooner or later because they own this place.”
Gorge Carlin, writer, critic and comedian.

And where is the mainstream media in all of this? Where are those journalists whose claim to respectability is their rigid professionalism, their accountability, their objectivity?
If you can call professionalism, accountability and objectivity being
in the pocket of and not wishing to offend advertising interests,
officialdom, lobbyists or corporate think tanks then they are paragons
of absolute virtue!

Peddling their high salaried lies, they have failed and continue to
fail the public. By shining their dim ‘investigative’ light on
‘parliamentary procedures’, personalities, the rubber stamping of
policies and the inane machinations of party politics, they merely serve
to maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public in the
dark as to the unaccountable self-serving powerbroking and unity of
interests that enable Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the
rest of them to keep bleeding us all dry.

Looking back to the BBC’s reporting of the NATO bombing of Libya
provides quite revealing insight into the mainstream media. The coverage
was disgracefully one-sided. Is the public to pay for a ‘public
service’ broadcaster in order to be misled and for it to secure our
compliance for illegal state-corporate policies? There was little
analysis of ‘mission’ drift’ or of where the insurgents where getting
their arms from despite a UN-sanctioned arms embargo. Much less of
NATO’s moral right to bomb a path into Tripoli. No talk there of what
University of Johannesburg professor Chris Landsberg said was NATO’s
violation of international law or of the 200 prominent African figures
who accused western nations of subverting international law.

On the other hand, though, what we are served courtesy of the
mainstream media each time Britain decides to wage war is a tasty dish
of nationalistic sentiment and the old colonial mentality of ‘our boys’
going out ‘there’ to help civilize the barbarians.

But that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and reproduce the
material conditions of an exploitative and divisive social system on a
daily basis. It’s called having a compliant, toothless media. It’s liberal democracy. That’s the role not only of the media, but the education system and the political system too.

And that’s why former British PM was some years ago told by his
financial masters to sell of what was laughingly regarded as ‘the
nation’s gold’ at a knock down price on behalf of bankers’ (not the
nation’s) interests without being held up to genuine public scrutiny.
Some say that was the first ‘bail out’ (7). That’s why taxpayers’ money,
unbeknown to most of the taxpayers, is being used unaccountably and
undemocratically to help prop up banks and to topple various countries
and bring death and destruction to thousands via ‘covert ops’. Covert –
hidden from the public who remain blissfully unaware of where their hard
earned dollars, pounds or euros are actually going.

That’s why the state-corporate fraudsters, murderers and liars who wrap themselves in the language of freedom and democracy have been getting away with it for so long. Sadly, that’s why they continue to do so.

The
Iowa caucuses marked the official beginning of the presidential
election cycle. For the next 10 months or so, the American public will
endure polls, pundits, canned stump speeches and negative ads—the media
circus that passes for 21st-century democracy. Despite this flood of
coverage, one troubling feature of our elections will go largely
unmentioned: The typical American voter is uninformed about political
basics. Consider these facts:

• The vast majority of voters can't name their congressman or a single congressional candidate.

• 45% of adults don't know that each state elects two senators.

• 40% of Americans can't name the vice president.

• 63% can't name the chief justice of the U.S.

This
isn't a recent phenomenon. In 1964, at the height of the Cold War,
only 38% of Americans knew that the Soviet Union wasn't part of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In December 1994, a month after the
Republican takeover of Congress, 57% of Americans had never heard of
Newt Gingrich. As Winston Churchill once said, "The best argument
against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average
voter."

Yet
despite this, voting remains the best way to elect leaders. Churchill,
as usual, said it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government
except all the others that have been tried."

Why
are democracies so vibrant even when composed of uninformed citizens?
According to a new study led by the ecologist Iain Couzin at Princeton,
this collective ignorance is an essential feature of democratic
governments, not a bug. His research suggests that voters with weak
political preferences help to prevent clusters of extremists from
dominating the political process. Their apathy keeps us safe.

To
show this, Dr. Couzin experimented on a rather unlikely set of
subjects: fish. Many different species, such as schooling fish and
flocking birds, survive by forming a consensus, making collective
decisions without splintering apart. To do so, these creatures are
constantly forced to conduct their own improvised elections.

The
scientists trained a large group of golden shiners, a small freshwater
fish used as bait, to associate the arrival of food with a blue
target. They then trained a smaller group to associate food with a
yellow target, a color naturally preferred by the fish. Not
surprisingly, when all the trained golden shiners were put in one
aquarium, most of them swam toward the yellow dot; the stronger desires
of the minority, fueled by the shiners' natural preference, persuaded
the majority to follow along.

But
when scientists introduced a group of fish without any color training,
yellow suddenly lost its appeal. All of a sudden, the fish began
following the preferences of the majority, swimming toward the blue
target. "A strongly opinionated minority can dictate group choice," the
scientists concluded. "But the presence of uninformed individuals
spontaneously inhibits this process, returning control to the numerical
majority."

Of
course, many political scientists have criticized this extrapolation
from golden shiners to democratic government, noting that not all
independent voters are ignorant—some are simply moderate—and that a
minority doesn't always represent an extreme view.

Nevertheless,
this research helps to explain the importance of indifference in a
partisan age. If every voter was well-informed and highly opinionated,
then the most passionate minority would dominate decision-making. There
would be no democratic consensus—just clusters of stubborn fanatics,
attempting to out-shout the other side. Hitler's rise is the ultimate
parable here: Though the Nazi party failed to receive a majority of the
votes in the 1933 German election, it was able to quickly intimidate
the opposition and pass tyrannical laws.

So
the next time a poll reveals the ignorance of the voting public,
remember those fish. It's the people who don't know very much who make
democracy possible.

Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of
Ideas

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green). (Credit: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks." The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks. One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders. Each of these individuals held a view, but were also, importantly, open minded to other views.

Once the networks were built, the scientists then "sprinkled" in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.

"In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models," said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models "talked" to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener's belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

"As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change," Sreenivasan said. "People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn't change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10."

The research has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads. "There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion," said Associate Professor of Physics and co-author of the paper Gyorgy Korniss. "Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village."

The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican. The research was funded by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) through SCNARC, part of the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

The research is part of a much larger body of work taking place under SCNARC at Rensselaer. The center joins researchers from a broad spectrum of fields -- including sociology, physics, computer science, and engineering -- in exploring social cognitive networks. The center studies the fundamentals of network structures and how those structures are altered by technology. The goal of the center is to develop a deeper understanding of networks and a firm scientific basis for the newly arising field of network science.

Scientists say America is too dumb for democracy to thriveThey know what's best for the country

The
United States may be a republic, but it’s democracy that
Americans cherish. After all, that’s why we got into Iraq, right? To
take out a dictator and spread democracy. “Government of the people, by
the people, for the people.” “One
person, one vote.” We are an egalitarian society that treasures the
mandate of its citizenry. But more than a decade’s worth research
suggests that the citizenry is too dumb to pick the best leaders. Work
by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and
then-colleague Justin Kruger found that “incompetent people are
inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the
quality of those people’s ideas,” according to a report by Life’s Little Mysteries on the blog LiveScience.

“Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because
most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea
is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

What’s worse is that with incompetence comes the illusion of
superiority. Let’s say a politician comes up with an ingenious plan that
would
ensure universal health care while decreasing health care costs.
According to Dunning-Kruger, no matter how much information is
provided, the unsophisticated would 1) be incapable of recognizing the
wisdom of such a plan; 2) assume they know better; and 3) have no idea
of the extent of their inadequacy. In other words, stupid people are too
stupid to know how stupid they are. If this seems elitist to you, you
are probably not alone. Maybe we
should only let Ph.D.’s, Mensa members and Jeopardy! champions vote? At
least require a passing an IQ test before you get to cast a ballot?

The scientists do say that the incompetent can be trained to improve,
but only if they acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, which
would seem to be a catch-22 since they are too ignorant to do so on
their own. Life’s Little Mysteries said that Mato Nagel, a sociologist in
Germany, ran a computer simulation of a democratic election based on
Dunning and Kruger’s theories: “In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters’
own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were
really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that
each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a
political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an
election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only
slightly better than average always won.”

It would appear then that democracy dooms us to mediocrity and
misinformed choices. Not exactly encouraging news for the next round of
California’s ballot initiatives.

The Decline of Democracy: Greece displays the post-liberal variety, Egypt the pre-liberal one. Both are rotten

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other
forms that have been tried from time to time. Everyone knows who said
this, and everyone thinks it's true. But is it, really?

After last weekend I've begun to have my doubts. In Egypt, the ruling
military junta reacted to the apparent victory of Muslim Brotherhood
presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi by stripping the presidential
office of its powers. That came just days after Egypt's top court
dissolved the Islamist-dominated parliament, which had been freely
elected only a few months ago. How arbitrary. What an affront to the Egyptian people. Now let's hope it works.

Then there's Greece, which also had an election over the weekend. The
Greeks are supposed to have made the "responsible" choice in the person
of Antonis Samaras, the Amherst- and Harvard-educated leader of the
center-right New Democracy party. Responsible in this case means trying
to stay in the euro zone by again renegotiating the terms of a bailout
that Greeks cannot possibly repay and will not likely honor.

Yet the more depressing fact about the election is that Mr. Samaras
didn't even get 30% of the vote. The rest was divided among the
radical-left Syriza (27%), the socialist Pasok (12.3%), the anti-German
Independent Greeks (7.5%), the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn (7%), the
center-left Democratic Left (6.2%) and, finally, the good old Communist
Party (4.5%).

In other words, the Greeks gave a solid 46%
of their vote to parties that are evil, crazy or both, even while erring
on the side of "sanity" with parties that are merely foolish and
discredited. Imagine that in 1980 Jimmy Carter had eked out a slim
victory over a Gus Hall-Lyndon LaRouche ticket, and you have the
American equivalent to what just happened in Greece.

Should anyone be surprised that democracy is having such a hard time
in the land of Pericles? Probably not—and not just because Greece is
also the land of Alcibiades. Despite its storied past, modern Greek
democracy, like much of modern European democracy, is of a post-liberal
variety. Post-liberalism seeks to replace the classical liberalism of
individual liberty, limited government, property rights and democratic
sovereignty with a new liberalism that favors social rights, social
goods, intrusive government and transnational law.

In
practice, post-liberalism is a giant wealth redistribution scheme.
It bankrupted Greece and will soon bankrupt the rest of Europe. What
happens to bankrupt democracies? Think Weimar Germany, Perón's
Argentina, and, more recently, Yeltsin's Russia.Now take Egypt. There,
instead of post-liberal democracy, you have the energetic stirrings of pre-liberal democracy.

What is pre-liberal democracy? It is democracy shorn of the values
Westerners typically associate it with: free speech, religious liberty,
social tolerance, equality between the sexes and so on. Not only in
Egypt, but in Tunisia, Turkey and Gaza, popular majorities have made a
democratic choice for parties that put faith before freedom and
substituted the word of God for the rule of law.

Apologists for this sort of democracy argue that it still beats the
alternatives, not just the coarse authoritarianism typified by Hosni
Mubarak but also the progressive-autocratic model that used to prevail
in Turkey. They also argue that democracy has a way of taming
ideologically extreme political leaders by tethering them to the needs
and wishes of the people, just as a talented cowboy will rope and halter
an unruly horse.

But there's a problem with this
analogy: In pre-liberal societies, it is the people who are the horse
and the leaders who do the roping, not the other way around. An Egypt
ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood will respect democratic procedure only
to the extent that it does not infringe on the Brotherhood's overarching
goals: "Restoring Islam in its all-encompassing conception; subjugating
people to God; instituting the religion of God; the Islamization of
life," according to Khairat Al Shater, the Brotherhood's de facto
leader.

That's the kind of democracy we can soon expect from Egypt unless the
military somehow gets the upper hand politically. Don't bet on it. If
post-liberal democracy is unsustainable ("They always run out of other
people's money," as Margaret Thatcher quipped), pre-liberal democracy is
irresistible. The objections of an aged and ambivalent junta will not
long stand in the way of millions of Egyptians demanding their right to
choose unfreedom freely.

The good news is that Egyptians may have a wider conception of
freedom in 30 years or so, about the same amount of time it took
Khomeinism to lose the masses in Iran. In 30 years, too, the Greeks may
have a better appreciation of the notion of responsibility, both
personal and political. As for what remains of the liberal democratic
world, maybe the weekend elections will be a reminder of another famous
political maxim: "A republic—if you can keep it."

Rome holds a special place in the popular imagination. Cast as a culture steeped in myth, with values reminiscent of our own, it is often treated as the forebearer of our own political system, an ancestral democracy that provides a republican link between the present and the ancient past. From architecture to literature to political system, Rome is where it all began. But in his latest book, Richard Alston wants us all to think a little more critically about our beloved Rome.

Alston is a Professor of Roman History at the University of London’s Royal Holloway, and the inspiration for Rome’s Revolution: Death of the Republic and Birth of the Empire came from his own dissatisfaction with the existing body of work on Roman politics. He saw how the idealized vision of Roman culture that these works present influenced the way his students thought about Rome. “Somehow,” Alston writes in the preface, “it was all too nice … but the Roman accounts of their revolution are anything but nice. They were shocked and shocking.”

The revolution in question is the upheaval following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, and the eventual shift from republic to empire that Rome experienced in the 70 years that followed. The murder of Caesar by members of the Roman senate is as much part of popular culture as history, a historical turning point that’s been passed down through the centuries. But while both rhetoric at the time and common knowledge today suggests that the assassination was a win for republicanism, Alston quickly sets about skewering that narrative.

As Alston points out, Rome quickly devolved into civil war, with three men eventually bringing peace and beginning the consolidation of power. Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian put into place a government predicated on a state of emergency, reserving for themselves unprecedented levels of power while using the rhetoric of the republic to pander to Roman values. After all, if Caesar had to be killed in order to set to rights the republic he co-opted, the legitimacy of those who came after him depended on playing to republican institutions and the illusion of senatorial leadership.

It was a slow and complex march toward empire from there, as Antony and Lepidus were eliminated by Octavian through civil war, political maneuvering, and careful manipulation of the public. By making sizable payments to Roman soldier and citizens, while using violence and fear to maintain order, Octavian gradually secured power for himself and positioned his family as a dynasty. When he died in 14 AD, Rome was an empire and the republic was no more.

While fascinating, those who don’t have a very solid background in Roman history may find the barrage of names, changing titles, and places in the ancient world overwhelming at times. The close attention to detail and examination of places where fact and political narrative possibly diverge back up the claims that Alston makes regarding the violence and competition in Roman society. But they also make the book an involved read that’s easy to get turned around in. The same goes for the complicated network of marriages, divorces, political targeting, and infighting that define the leading families, illustrating the messy web of loyalties that’s difficult to follow for a casual reader.

Where Rome’s Revolution shines, though, is in the bigger picture. Alston carefully deconstructs the myths Romans held about their own origins and political values, breaking down the narratives about civilization and democracy to show the messy inner workings of an ancient system built on hierarchy and violence. When the senators stabbed Caesar, it was a bloody and symbolic attempt to return to the “good old days” of Roman strength, ending dictatorship in order to get back to a more pure manifestation of their values as a state. As the shift from republic to empire begins, leaders claiming a desire to save Rome from moral failings, by imposing restrictions on the private lives of citizens, look to the past to justify their decrees, albeit a past that was selectively chosen from a far more complex context.

Comparisons between Rome and the United States are common and often alarmist speculation about the possible decline of the United States. But in Rome’s Revolution, the possible lessons learned feel decidedly more applicable given the current political climate. A glorified myth of past greatness, espoused values that clash with the reality of leadership, and attempts to govern the supposed morality of citizens all feel very contemporary. The fact that a movement to restore the state to the mythic stature it once supposedly had failed is perhaps a far more realistic lesson to draw from Rome than the possible signs of the end of a former world power.

Although at times daunting for a reader unfamiliar with the intricacies of Roman politics, Rome’s Revolution is still a strikingly poignant examination of the dangers in self-aggrandizing myths of national glory, and the ways in which efforts to return to a non-existent past can push a state further from their supposed values. The inconsistency of ideology, action, and rhetoric in Rome feels entirely too relatable at times, while our own readiness to take Roman historical narratives at face value rather than critically looking at those inconsistencies calls into question the way Rome fits into our own flawed sense of exceptionalism. For Rome, the greatest threat to republicanism wasn’t outside forces, but internal power grabs cloaked in the rhetoric of popular government. Perhaps that is the cautionary tale the U.S. should be looking towards.

As
the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what
is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on
the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name
only. While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with
unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real
power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and
corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want.
The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

So
what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly
obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest,
while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public
services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One
state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public
employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of
thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem,
laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that
provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from
nearly all quarters. The poor, who are suffering from an all-out
depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might
as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion
dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in
search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and
needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.

In
an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John
Kerry said that the Egyptian people “have made clear they will settle
for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic
opportunities.” Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the
opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades,
democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones
who could afford it. The corporate and financial elites threw astounding
sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists
and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of.
They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them
on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations
and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the
government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big
time.

As
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All
Politics”: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public
officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American
economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the
many.”

As
if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight
enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens
United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming
power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real
access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto
ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate
money speaks.

When
the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst
economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting
on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among
the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and
Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as
though society has treated them unfairly.

As
Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The
Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower
personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and
much less oversight of industry — especially environmental
regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make
you sick.)

It’s
a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs
have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have
so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts
for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young
and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?

The
Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long,
hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive
process of letting a real democracy slip away. I had lunch with the
historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010.
He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all
daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it
will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people
themselves.” I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic
celebrations in the streets of Cairo.

Roman politicians whipped up crowds, warned about ‘outsiders’ and insulted their rivals.

Ancient Romans would find the drama of American primary elections
eerily familiar. Like us, the Romans treated politics as theater,
attending speeches and rallies where political figures worked the crowd.
They held popular elections and supported charismatic leaders who
thrived on celebrity. When Cicero ran for consul around 63
B.C., his brother Quintus wrote a fascinating manual of political
advice. Quintus urged Cicero to be available night and day to citizens
who needed his services, to look alert and interested when voters spoke,
and to make them believe he cared. It was the beginning of a romance,
when followers come to believe that what leaders do, they do for them.

But before aspiring officeholders can be seen as worthy of public affection, they first must be seen. Reality-TV star Donald Trump
is a modern-day master at capturing public notice, but he is no
trailblazer. Those seeking power have always found ways to achieve
celebrity. Romans vying for office bleached their togas a
brilliant white, making them stand out. Candidates also surrounded
themselves with throngs of supporters to attract maximum attention. The
“social media” campaigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus featured
flattering portraits displayed in public places. After being elected,
they stamped their profiles on coins to further enhance their celebrity.

Star
power fueled narcissism then as it does now. Julius Caesar was a deft
schmoozer, adept at working the crowd. Affable and adored by soldiers,
he was the kind of guy you could drink the famed Falernian wine with.
But his narcissism undermined him. Caesar became hated for his
arrogance, and dozens of Roman senators joined the conspiracy to
assassinate him.

Winning political arguments has always required
style, not just substance. And nobody in the age of the Republic was
better at style than Cato the Censor. As the Senate debated around 149
B.C. what action to take against its old foe Carthage, Cato produced a
cluster of grapes from the folds of his toga. He declared, no doubt
falsely, that they had been picked in Carthage the same day. His
dramatic performance worked. Though Carthage hadn’t posed a serious
threat for over half a century, Cato energized his compatriots’ fears of
its resurgence, silenced critics and shaped a docile following. Rome
declared war and finally destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C.

Charismatic
leaders are good actors. Whether facing constituents, competitors or
enemies, they present themselves as dominant and fit. When Gaius
Popilius Laenas first encountered the Seleucid King Antiochus IV in 168
B.C., he used a stick to draw a circle in the sand around the king. He
ordered him not to cross it until he agreed to do Rome’s bidding.
Intimidated by the brazen act, the king acquiesced. Roman leaders knew
that anger stunts contemplation. Opponents excoriated one another with
vitriolic insults. Cicero accused Mark Antony
of having been a male prostitute in his youth and of frequenting
brothels later in life. Such slurs, difficult to disprove, distracted
attention from Antony’s achievements and Cicero’s flaws.

Shared
feelings and actions have always been used by charismatic leaders to
bring people together in common cause. At Julius Caesar’s funeral Mark
Antony whipped mourners into a collective frenzy by revealing the dead
man’s lacerated body. Today the synchronous chants of “Bernie!” and
“Hillary!” or the contagious booing and applauding at the Republican
debates help transform individuals into easy-to-lead collectives. Overstating
the threat posed by “outsiders” also reinforces the common identity of
the “insiders.” Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, suggested around
33 B.C. that his rival, Mark Antony, had become the plaything of the
enemy’s most famous seductress, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt. Octavian
warned that if Antony came to power, then a foreigner would become
Rome’s queen. Now Mr. Trump professes concern that the Canadian-born Ted Cruz could become president.

As
the politically savvy Quintus understood, voters are romanced more by
appearance than reality. Roman leaders knew that politics is theater,
and much depends on the power of the script and the stardom and charisma
of the performer. In this sense, political figures through the ages are
cut from the same bleached cloth.

Inequality among men is as natural as breathing or eating.
Understanding this truism will generally save a person about 90% of the
frustration that they would otherwise feel towards human societies and
political systems. Never in the history of mankind – not even in the
most hopelessly utopian of efforts by social levelers – has this natural
inequality ever truly been overcome.

The natural outcome of these inequalities (and I am speaking here within national and cultural bodies, not of relations between
them) is that elites will always arise. Within nations, aristocracies
will always occur for a variety of reasons. Even within democratic
systems, Robert Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy
will operate, ensuring that a leadership caste rises to the top to
effectively dominate the politics and social system within a nation or
political subunit. Looking to classical history, we see that even in
places and at times when rampant democritisation took place (e.g. Athens
from ~525 – 350 BC, late Republican Rome), the initiative for these
efforts arose not from the demos themselves, but from popular
(and generally aristocratic) leaders who wielded the people as a weapon
for gaining political power. Let us not forget the Cleisthenes, whose
reform of the Athenian constitution set that city on course for direct
democracy, was of the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family; Julius Caesar and
other late Republican leaders of the populares came from aristocratic senatorial families.

No less a democrat than Thomas Jefferson himself said, “There is a
natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and
talent.” Though Jefferson was (obviously) a vigourous opponent of
formal aristocracy, his statement is nevertheless true, and explains why
aristocracies – elites within societies – originate.

Aristocracies generally originate and evolve during periods in which a
society is expanding and growing, and thus needs the expansion of its
leadership caste. It is during these periods that “new blood,”
generally demonstrating a mix of intelligence, talent, and audacity, is
given the opportunity to assert itself and join the previous hereditary
elite, if such already exists or hasn’t been overthrown (in which case,
the “new blood” replaces the old). This nobility is generally made up
of those with the courage, cunning, skills, and enterprise to seize
opportunities that present themselves and to motivate men to follow them
to glory. This is, in a nutshell, pretty much the story for the
establishment of the feudal aristocracies that evolved out of the
Germanic conquests of western Europe after Rome fell. In many cases,
petty chieftains or enterprising warriors were able to establish
themselves in the new lands and initiate dynasties that lasted, in some
cases, for centuries before being absorbed into the growing medieval
nation-states. The Counts of Anjou, for instance, established a county
that produced many illustrious members, such as Fulk III (the Black).
Indeed, the great duchies, counties, and baronies largely began as
statelets carved out by the ancestors of those whose names we are more
familiar with from medieval history. At least at the times they gained
power, aristocrats were true to their titles – they were the best and
the brightest in their societies.

However, we need not think of aristocracy solely in the sense of
hereditary nobles bearing titles and coats of arms. Even nations in the
West which have more robust republican or democratic traditions and
which either decimated or else consciously avoided the older-style
hereditary aristocracy (such as France and the United States,
respectively), still possess elites who have risen to the top of the
political and social systems in place. In our systems, these elites
generally rise through a combination of statesmanship, education and
scholarship, and juridical capabilities, though not a few have entered
the “democratic” aristocracies through prowess in warfare and their
natural leadership abilities. In these cases, membership tends to be
more fluid and less hereditary, though the presence of multigeneration
American political clans from the Adamses to the Kennedies and Bushes shows this to not always be the case.

The problem with aristocracies is that they tend to become decadent
and degenerate. To them often applies quite well the plaintive words of
Horace,

“Time corrupts all. What has it not made worse?
Our grandfathers sired feebler children; theirs
Were weaker still – ourselves; and now our curse
Must be to breed even more degenerate heirs.”

This most closely applies to hereditary aristocracies whose
membership is much more closed to new blood, as the European aristocracy
became. Not only do the morals and the capabilities of such lines tend
to degenerate, but very often their genetics do as well – witness
Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, a man who could barely chew
his own food because of the extreme genetic deformity of his jaw and
who was virtually ignored by his own advisors and regents. So-called
“democratic” aristocracies are not immune to this degeneration; however,
their degeneracy tends to take on an institutional and systematic form,
rather than familial and personal. What degenerates is not necessarily
the individual members, but the “aristocratical system” set into place
by the ruling class.

As an aristocratic system degenerates, its members become more and
more unworthy of the position to which heredity or connexions have
placed them. This is certainly the case with the present “elite” which
we see in the United States and other Western nations. Traditionally,
the democratic elites in the Western nations that adopted some form of
republicanism or parliamentary democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries
were – despite the “democratic” nature of their systems – genuine
elites. Those who really rose to the top in terms of esteem and
respectability were men who genuinely had the best interests of their
nations at heart, and who had the statesmanship, education, and
intelligence to guide their respective ships of state. Unfortunately,
this aristocratic system degenerated as well, and led to the present
crop of “elites” have now completely broken with this tradition.

Starting in the late 1960s, these “elites” (which we would identify
today as the “progressives” and other left-liberals who largely dominate
the political, media, educational, and other culture-driving
institutions) began their Gramscian “long march through the
institutions. Through the intervening decades, they were able to usurp
control over these from the traditional elites who guided them
previously.

This “elite,” however, is fundamentally different from the earlier
aristocracy which guided our politics and institutions. Membership in
the current progressive elite is not derived from ability, intelligence,
a genuine classical education in the humanities, or the ability to
learn and apply the law. Rather, membership in this group is centered
about one thing – adherence to (or at least submission to) the
progressive ideology. The more closely a progressive holds to the
doctrinaire ideology of socialism, communism, and cultural marxism, the
more successful they will be. While earlier elites were typically
characterised by such things as martial virtue, statesmanship, and
classical education, the present progressive “elites” do not embody any of these traits. Indeed, the typical progressive is diametrically opposite to these.

Progressives are, to put it frankly, stupid and unlettered people.
While they like to think of themselves as “educated” (and may indeed
possess multiple degrees from educational institutions, degrees which
they could only “earn” because other progressives were in power to grant
these to them), the average progressive is grossly ignorant about
a wide range of topics that are vitally important to the possession of
true leadership abilities. Progressives, by virtue of their
transnational and globalist leanings, cannot by definition be
“statesmen,” since that term necessarily implies devotion to the
guidance of a nation-state. In many cases, progressives are actively
hostile toward the military, cultural, and political success of the
nations over which they exercise influence.

As a result, we must recognise that these progressive “elites” are a wholly and completely unnatural
phenomenon. Natural aristocracy is based on the inequalities of
abilities, intelligence, daring, and other qualities that exist between
different people, and which allow those who possess them to rise to the
top, if they will exercise these natural advantages. Because claims to
elite status made by progressives rely solely on unthinking
subordination to an artificial ideology, their “aristocracy” is also
artificial. This aristocracy exists because it tries to bend reality to
meet the demands of ideology, rather than the other way around. This
explains why, in places dominated by these progressive elites, so many
stupid, unworthy, and outright ridiculous people nevertheless rise to
the top in the system. This amply explains how people like Barack
Obama, Loretta Lynch, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and others like them
end up where they are today.

These people are wholly unworthy of their “elite” status. I believe
that, at least on a subconscious level, this is widely recognised, and
explains why there is so much growing opposition to them in just the
last few years. Having reached the point where they are so
ridiculous that their unnaturalness can no longer be ignored, a backlash
appears to be in the offing. Will the impending Trumpening of the
United States represent the beginning of the end for the current
progressive, transnational, globalistic, anti-western “elite”? The rise
of the nationalists all across Europe, as well, suggests that the end
may be nearing for the elite status of the progressives. Now is the
time for those on the broad alt-Right to prepare themselves to emerge as
the new aristocracy that replaces the old, much as the German
chieftains replaced Roman senators all across Gaul, Spain, Italy, and
Britain fifteen centuries ago. We are the new blood, and now may well
be our time.

A rigged democratic system, a “grotesque” military fighting unwinnable wars under the “drone commander in chief”, and the future of the movement behind presidential candidate Bernie Sanders were the focus of Day One at the Left Forum in New York City. This weekend’s theme “Rage, Rebellion, Revolution” brings thousands to John Jay College from Friday through Sunday. Journalist Chris Hedges, author and activist Tariq Ali, and Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin headlined the opening plenary with fiery remarks moderated by Laura Flanders.

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, addressed the nature of power in the 2016 presidential election. “It is our job to make the powerful frightened of us,” he said. “That is what movements do. Movements keep power in check, and as any good anarchist will tell you, power is always the problem, no matter who holds it.”According to Hedges, who doesn’t hold out hope for Sanders getting the Democratic Party nomination, said it was a mistake to run within that party and that both Sanders and his supporters are now dealing with the fact that the system is rigged.“The cost of running the primaries is that paid for by the taxpayers,” Hedges said. “And yet, the primary rules are determined by the Democratic Party, so that they can manipulate a system as they did in Nevada, to steal the vote from Sanders.” Citing the exclusion of independents in closed primaries and the dominance of superdelegates and super PACs, Hedges added: “It’s very clear that without all of these mechanisms, Sanders would win the nomination.” He insisted there is “palpable evidence that democracy within the United States is a fraud,” and referred to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s high unfavorability ratings to highlight the importance of creating movements outside the system of “the mantra of ‘the least worst.’” As for outgoing President Barack Obama, Hedges said his attack on civil liberties has been worse than that by George W Bush, pointing to his use of the Espionage Act.

Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin, the Code Pink activist known for infiltrating Congressional hearings and the Republican convention, started by disagreeing with Hedges’ opinion that Sanders should have run as an independent, describing the party as Clinton, Wall Street, and the weapons industry on one side and people who “really want the Democratic Party to represent their values and they are values that Bernie Sanders is standing for” on the other. Benjamin took an impromptu straw poll of those in the room, asking who was voting for Hillary Clinton, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, libertarian Gary Johnson, or Republican Donald Trump. Stein won by a huge majority, showing that the “lesser of two evils” argument may not force Sanders supporters to settle for Clinton. Benjamin praised Obama, a frequent adversary, for his “successes” with the Iran nuclear deal and Cuba, adding, “Let’s not forget, they did not happen while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.” Her lovefest for the current president quickly ended when she referred to him as “the drone commander in chief,” reminding everyone of the way he spread “horrendous technology” and failed to reduce terrorism. While giving props to Donald Trump’s NATO skepticism, she emphasized, “Let’s not be fooled by Trump,” noting that his campaign built on Islamophobia, anti-immigration and the fact that he is open to bringing back torture. Benjamin ended on a positive by highlighting how the “localized economy” could replace the war economy, encouraging people to invest in credit unions, buy from local farmers, and choose thrift shops over sweatshops. “This is the kind of economy we have to build,” she said.

Tariq Ali

Legendary activist Tariq Ali, the supposed inspiration of the Rolling Stones hit “Street Fightin’ Man”, brought an international perspective to the US election and said “we are on the verge of change,” referring to the mobilization of people around Sanders, which has brought people together “more than any other time in recent US history.” He then brought the crowd across the pond to talk about Jeremy Corbyn’s remarkable uphill struggle within his own party and the establishment, citing the senior army general who told Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times that if Corbyn was elected Prime Minister, there would be “mutinies in the army and they would refuse to follow orders.” Ali also took a wary view of London’s new Muslim Labour Party Mayor Sadiq Khan, particularly how his centrist views clash with Corbyn’s vision for the party. An early session on Saturday takes us inside the cooperative revolution in Jackson, Mississippi, which currently faces pushback from the Republican governor and state legislature. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Socialist city councilmember Kshama Sawant headline Saturday’s events, while Sunday features what promises to be an electric conversation between Democracy Now host Amy Goodman and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek. Shandre Delaney, mother of Carrington Keys - one of the Dallas 6 who took a stand against prison abuse at the hands of officers in a Pennsylvania state prison, and a coordinator of the Justice for the Dallas 6 Support Campaign, will also be taking part in panel discussion on Sunday entitled "Leadership and Power for the Movement for Prisoners’ Rights, and against Solitary Confinement." Others in attendance over the weekend include Debra Sweet from the World Can't Wait group, which, as per its website, aims "to halt and reverse the terrible program of war, repression and theocracy that was initiated by the Bush / Cheney regime and the ongoing crimes."

Former President Jimmy Carter Is Correct that the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy

On July 28th,
Thom Hartmann interviewed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and, at
the very end of his show (as if this massive question were merely an
aftethought), asked him his opinion of the 2010 Citizens United decision and the 2014 McCutcheon
decision, both decisions by the five Republican judges on the U.S.
Supreme Court. These two historic decisions enable unlimited secret
money (including foreign money) now to pour into U.S. political and
judicial campaigns. Carter answered:

"It violates the essence
of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's
just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of
getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And
the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress
members. So, now we've just seen a subversion of our political system as
a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get,
favors for themselves after the election is over. ... At the present
time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited
money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in
Congress has a great deal more to sell."

He was then cut off by the program, though that statement by Carter should have been the start of the program, not its end.
(And the program didn't end with an invitation for him to return to
discuss this crucial matter in depth -- something for which he's
qualified.) So: was this former president's provocative allegation
merely his opinion? Or was it actually lots more than that? It was lots more than that.

Only
a single empirical study has actually been done in the social sciences
regarding whether the historical record shows that the United States has
been, during the survey's period, which in that case was between 1981
and 2002, a democracy (a nation whose leaders represent the
public-at-large), or instead an aristocracy (or 'oligarchy') -- a nation
in which only the desires of the richest citizens end up being
reflected in governmental actions. This study was titled "Testing Theories of American Politics," and it was published by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page in the journal Perspectives on Politics,
issued by the American Political Science Association in September 2014.
I had summarized it earlier, on 14 April 2014, while the article was
still awaiting its publication.

The headline of my summary-article was "U.S. Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy Says Scientific Study."
I reported: "The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, no
democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham, no matter how
much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control
the nation's 'news' media)." I then quoted the authors' own summary:
"The preferences of the average American appear to have only a
minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public
policy."

The scientific study closed by saying: "In the United
States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule--at least not
in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes." A few
other tolerably clear sentences managed to make their ways into this
well-researched, but, sadly, atrociously written, paper, such as: "The
preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the
preferences of 'affluent' citizens) have far more independent impact
upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do." In
other words, they found: The rich rule the U.S.

Their study
investigated specifically "1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in
which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose
question about a proposed policy change," and then the
policy-follow-ups, of whether or not the polled public preferences had
been turned into polices, or, alternatively, whether the relevant
corporate-lobbied positions had instead become public policy on the
given matter, irrespective of what the public had wanted concerning it.

The study period, 1981-2002, covered the wake of the landmark 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo,
which had started the aristocratic assault on American democracy, and
which seminal (and bipartisan) pro-aristocratic court decision is
described as follows by wikipedia:
It "struck down on First Amendment grounds several provisions in the
1974 Amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. The most prominent
portions of the case struck down limits on spending in campaigns, but
upheld the provision limiting the size of individual contributions to
campaigns. The Court also narrowed, and then upheld, the Act's
disclosure provisions, and struck down (on separation of powers grounds)
the make-up of the Federal Election Commission, which as written
allowed Congress to directly appoint members of the Commission, an
executive agency."

Basically, the Buckley decision, and
subsequent (increasingly partisan Republican) Supreme Court decisions,
have allowed aristocrats to buy and control politicians.

Already,
the major 'news' media were owned and controlled by the aristocracy,
and 'freedom of the press' was really just freedom of aristocrats to
control the 'news' -- to frame public issues in the ways the owners
want. The media managers who are appointed by those owners select, in
turn, the editors who, in their turn, hire only reporters who produce
the propaganda that's within the acceptable range for the owners, to be
'the news' as the public comes to know it.

But, now, in the post-Buckley-v.-Valeo
world, from Reagan on (and the resulting study-period of 1981-2002),
aristocrats became almost totally free to buy also the political
candidates they wanted. The 'right' candidates, plus the 'right'
'news'-reporting about them, has thus bought the 'right' people to
'represent' the public, in the new American 'democracy,' which Jimmy
Carter now aptly calls "subversion of our political system as a payoff
to major contributors."

Carter -- who had entered office in 1977,
at the very start of that entire era of transition into an
aristocratically controlled United States (and he left office in 1981,
just as the study-period was starting) -- expressed his opinion that, in
the wake now of the two most extreme pro-aristocratic U.S. Supreme
Court decisions ever (which are Citizens United in 2010, and McCutcheon
in 2014), American democracy is really only past tense, not present
tense at all -- no longer a reality. He is saying, in effect, that, no
matter how much the U.S. was a dictatorship by the rich during 1981-2002 (the Gilens-Page study era), it's far worse now.

Apparently, Carter is correct: The New York Times front page on Sunday 2 August 2015 bannered, "Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving," and reported that: "A
New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission reports and
Internal Revenue Service records shows that the fund-raising arms race
has made most of the presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small
pool of the richest Americans. The concentration of donors is greatest
on the Republican side, according to the Times analysis, where
consultants and lawyers have pushed more aggressively to exploit the
looser fund-raising rules that have fueled the rise of super PACs. Just
130 or so families and their businesses provided more than half the
money raised through June by Republican candidates and their super
PACs."

The Times study shows that the Republican Party
is overwhelmingly advantaged by the recent unleashing of big-corporate
money power. All of the evidence suggests that though different
aristocrats compete against each other for the biggest chunks of
whatever the given nation has to offer, they all compete on the same side against the public,
in order to lower the wages of their workers, and to lower the
standards for consumers' safety and welfare so as to increase their own
profits (transfer their costs and investment-losses onto others); and,
so, now, the U.S. is soaring again toward Gilded Age economic inequality, perhaps to surpass the earlier era of unrestrained robber barons. And, the Times
study shows: even in the Democratic Party, the mega-donations are going
to only the most conservative (pro-corporate, anti-public) Democrats.
Grass-roots politics could be vestigial, or even dead, in the new
America.

The question has become whether the unrestrained power of
the aristocracy is locked in this time even more permanently than it
was in that earlier era. Or: will there be yet another FDR (Franklin
Delano Roosevelt) to restore a democracy that once was? Or: is a
president like that any longer even possible in America? As for
today's political incumbents: they now have their careers for as long as
they want and are willing to do the biddings of their masters. And,
then, they retire to become, themselves, new members of the aristocracy,
such as the Clintons have done, and such as the Obamas will do. (Of
course, the Bushes have been aristocrats since early in the last
century.)

Despite
the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories
of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the
American public actually have little influence over the policies our
government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to
democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and
association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we
believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business
organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then
America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.- From a recent study titledTesting Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizensby Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University

In response to the publication of an academic study that essentially
proves the United States is nothing more than an oligarchy, many
commentators have quipped sentiments that go something like “so tell me
something I don’t know.” While I agree that the conclusion is far from
surprising to anyone paying attention, the study is significant for two
main reasons.

First, there is a certain influential segment of the population which
has a disposition which requires empirical evidence and academic
studies before they will take any theory seriously. Second, some of the
conclusions can actually prove quite helpful to activists who want to
have a greater impact in changing things. This shouldn’t be particularly
difficult since their impact at the moment is next to zero.

What is most incredible to me is that the data under scrutiny in the
study was from 1981-2002. One can only imagine how much worse things
have gotten since the 2008 financial crisis. The study found
that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy
change, it was only instituted 43% of the time. We saw this first hand with the bankster bailout in 2008, when Americans across the board were opposed to it, but Congress passed TARP anyway (although they had to vote twice).

Even more importantly, several years of supposed “economic recovery”
has not changed the public’s perception of the bankster bailouts. For
example, a 2012 study showed that only 23% percent of Americans favored
the bank bailouts and the disgust was completely bipartisan, as the Huffington Post points out.

Personally, I think the banker bailouts will go down as one of the
most significant turning points in American history. Despite widespread
disapproval, Congress passed TARP and it was at that moment that many
Americans “woke up” to the fact they are nothing more than economic
slaves with no voice. That they are serfs. Even more importantly, once
oligarchs saw what they could get away with they kept doubling down and
doubling down until we find ourselves in the precarious position we are
in today. A society filled with angst and resentment at the fact that the 0.01% have stolen everything.

Another thing that the study noted was that average citizens
sometimes got what they wanted, but this is almost always when their
preferences overlap with the oligarchs. When this occurs it is entirely
coincidental, and in many cases may the result of public opinion being
molded by the elite-controlled special interest groups themselves. How
pathetic. I read the entire 42 page study and have highlighted what I found to
be the key excerpts below. Please share with others and enjoy:

Multivariate
analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups
representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on
U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest
groups have little or no independent influence. The
results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite
Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Until very recently, however, it has been impossible to test the
differing predictions of these theories against each other within a
single statistical model that permits one to analyze the independent
effects of each set of actors upon policy outcomes.

A major challenge to majoritarian pluralist theories, however, is
posed by Mancur Olson’s argument that collective action by large,
dispersed sets of individuals with individually small but collectively
large interests tends to be prevented by the “free rider” problem.
Barring special circumstances (selective incentives, byproducts,
coercion), individuals who would benefit from collective action may have
no incentive to personally form or join an organized group.
If everyone thinks this way and lets George do it, the job is not
likely to get done. This reasoning suggests that Truman’s “potential
groups” may in fact be unlikely to form, even if millions of peoples’
interests are neglected or harmed by government. Aware of the collective
action problem, officials may feel free to ignore much of the
population and act against the interests of the average citizen.

As to empirical evidence concerning interest groups, it is well
established that organized groups regularly lobby and fraternize with
public officials; move through revolving doors between public and
private employment; provide self-serving information to officials;
draft legislation; and spend a great deal of money on election
campaigns. Moreover, in harmony with theories of biased pluralism, the evidence clearly indicates that most U.S. interest groups and lobbyists represent business firms or professionals.Relatively
few represent the poor or even the economic interests of ordinary
workers, particularly now that the U.S. labor movement has become so
weak.

What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the
existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us
(Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for estimating the
influence upon public policy of “affluent” citizens, poor citizens, and
those in the middle of the income distribution.

Gilens and a
small army of research assistants gathered data on a large, diverse set
of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a
national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question
about a proposed policy change.

In any case, the imprecision that results from use of our
“affluent” proxy is likely to produce underestimates of the impact of
economic elites on policy making. If we find substantial effects upon
policy even when using this imperfect measure, therefore, it will
be reasonable to infer that the impact upon policy of truly wealthy
citizens is still greater.

Some particular U.S. membership organizations – especially the
AARP and labor unions– do tend to favor the same policies as average
citizens. But other membership groups take stands that are unrelated
(pro-life and pro-choice groups) or negatively related (gun owners)
to what the average American wants. Some membership groups may reflect
the views of corporate backers or their most affluent constituents.
Others focus on issues on which the public is fairly evenly divided. Whatever
the reasons, all mass-based groups taken together simply do not add up,
in aggregate, to good representatives of the citizenry as a whole.
Business-oriented groups do even worse, with a modest negative over-all
correlation of -.10.

The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops
precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the median
citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian
Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites
and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories
of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected.
Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over
policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy
at all.

By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite
substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does
not mean that theories of Economic Elite Domination are wholly upheld,
since our results indicate that individual elites must share their
policy influence with organized interest groups. Still,
economic elites stand out as quite influential – more so than any other
set of actors studied here – in the making of U.S. public policy.

The incredible thing here is that they use the 90th percentile to gauge the “economic elite,” when we well know that it is the “oligarchs” themselves and the businesses they run that call all the shots. It would have been interesting if they isolated the impact of the 0.01%.

These
results suggest that reality is best captured by mixed theories in
which both individual economic elites and organized interest groups
(including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites)
play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the
general public has little or no independent influence. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the
public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30% of the time. More
strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with
80% of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about
43% of the time.

Amidst all of the bad news in this study, there is one conclusion from which we can find a silver lining.

The
importance of business groups’ numerical advantage is also revealed
when we rescale our measures of business and mass-oriented
interest group alignments to reflect the differing number of groups in
each of these categories. Using
this rescaled measure, a parallel analysis to that in table 4 shows
that on a group-for-group basis the average individual business group
and the average mass-oriented group appears to be about equally
influential. The
greater total influence of business groups in our analysis results
chiefly from the fact that more of them are generally engaged on each
issue (roughly twice as many, on average), not that a single
business-oriented group has more clout on average than a single mass
based group.

Relatively few
mass-based interest groups are active, they do not (in the aggregate)
represent the public very well, and they have less collective impact on
policy than do business-oriented groups – whose stands tend to be
negatively related to the preferences of average citizens.
These business groups are far more numerous and active; they spend much
more money; and they tend to get their way.

What the paragraphs above demonstrate is that the public has become
very, very bad at organizing and that they aren’t even in the same
ballpark as the the business groups. While mass-based interest groups
will never be able to compete financially, we now live in a world of
crowd-funding and a great deal of angst. Thus, there appears to be some
low hanging fruit available for the activist community to pick at and
become more organized.

Furthermore,
the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy,
the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact
upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To
be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out;
they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those
policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens
who wield the actual influence.

But sure, keep chanting USA! USA! and keep sending your children to die overseas for no good reason.

Of
course our findings speak most directly to the “first face” of power:
the ability of actors to shape policy outcomes on contested issues. But
they also reflect – to some degree, at least – the “second face” of
power: the ability to shape the agenda of issues that policy
makers consider. The set of policy alternatives that we analyze is
considerably broader than the set discussed seriously by policy makers
or brought to a vote in Congress, and our alternatives are (on average)
more popular among the general public than among interest groups. Thus
the fate of these policies can reflect policy makers’ refusing to
consider them rather than considering but rejecting them. (From our data
we cannot distinguish between the two.) Our
results speak less clearly to the “third face” of power: the ability of
elites to shape the public’s preferences. We know that interest groups
and policy makers themselves often devote considerable effort to shaping
opinion. If they are successful, this might help explain the high
correlation we find between elite and mass preferences. But it cannot
have greatly inflated our estimate of average citizens’ influence on
policy making, which is near zero.

So what’s the conclusion? Well we aren’t a Democracy and we aren’t a
Constitutional Republic. As I and many others have noted, we have
descended into something far worse, an neo-fedualistic Oligarchy.

What
do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly
constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who
want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy
preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings
indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in
the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a
majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with
organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the
strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when
fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally
do not get it.

A possible
objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are
inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we
worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy
making?Perhaps economic elites and interest group
leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does.
Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and
perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when
deciding which policies to support.

But we tend to
doubt it. We believe instead that – collectively – ordinary
citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and
that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.
Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational advantages of
elites. Yes, detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and
status. Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives tend to know a
lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But
how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security,
Medicare, Food Stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is
likely to be crucial to their own well-being? Most important, we see no
reason to think that informational expertise is always accompanied by an
inclination to transcend one’s own interests or a determination to work
for the common good.

All in all, we
believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its
own interests than any feasible alternative.Leaving aside
the difficult issue of divergent interests and motives, we would urge
that the superior wisdom of economic elites or organized interest groups
should not simply be assumed. It should be put to
empirical test. New empirical research will be needed to pin
down precisely who knows how much, and what, about which public
policies.

Our findings also point toward the need to learn more about
exactly which economic elites (the “merely affluent”? the top 1%? the
top 0.01%?) have how much impact upon public policy, and to what ends
they wield their influence. Similar questions arise about the
precise extent of influence of particular sets of organized interest
groups. And we need to know more about the policy preferences and the
political influence of various actors not considered here, including
political party activists, government officials, and other non-economic
elites. We hope that our work will encourage further exploration of
these issues.

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous
studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest
that majorities of the American public actually have little influence
over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many
features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections,
freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested)
franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful
business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then
America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

So when Sam Zell or any other oligarch prances around on television
saying that the “poor should be more like the rich,” what he’s really
saying is you need to sell your soul and attempt to become an oligarch.
Otherwise, you’re fucked. This is a truly excellent study and I suggest you read the entire thing here, if you have the time.

One of the predominant themes of the 2016 presidential campaign thus far
— and one that is unlikely to lose significance once the primaries give
way to the general election — is the American people’s exasperation
with a political system they see as corrupt, self-serving, disingenuous
and out of touch. It
is not an especially partisan or ideological sentiment; you can just as
easily find it among supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders as among fans of
Donald Trump. You can even find those who support paragons of the
status quo, like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, making similar complaints.
It’s about as close to a consensus position as you’re likely to find
nowadays in American politics. Yet
despite the widespread agreement that something is seriously wrong
with democracy in the U.S., there’s much less of a consensus as to what
that something is — and, crucially, how to fix it. The answers Bernie
Sanders offers, for example, are not exactly the same as those proffered
by Donald Trump. Is the problem too much government? Not enough
government? Too much immigration? Not enough immigration? Too much
taxing and regulating? Not enough taxing and regulating? Our lack
of a systemic analysis of the problem is part of the reason why our
answers are so diffuse and ill-fitting. And that’s just one of the
reasons why “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government,”
the new book from ex-longtime GOP staffer turned best-selling author
Mike Lofgren, is so valuable. Lofgren puts a name and a shape to a
problem that has often been only nebulously defined; and while his
conclusions are not exactly uplifting, the logic and sophistication of
his argument is hard to resist. Recently, Salon spoke over the
phone with Lofgren about his book, the deep state and his read on the
current sorry state of American government and politics. Our
conversation, which also touched on President Obama’s relationship with
the deep state, was edited for clarity and length.

How should
we think about the deep state? Is it an elite conspiracy? A loosely
defined social group? A network of specific institutions? How should we
conceive of it?

Well, first of all, it is not a conspiracy. It
is something that operates in broad daylight. It is not a
conspiratorial cabal. These are simply people who have evolved [into] a
kind of position. It is in their best interest to act in this way. And
given the fact that people would rather know about Kim Kardashian than
what makes up the budget or what the government is doing in Mali or
Sudan or other unknown places, this is what you get: a disconnected,
self-serving bureaucracy that is … simply evolving to do what it’s doing
now. That is, to maintain and enhance its own power.

When do you think the American deep state first started?

Probably,
it started in WWII, when we had the Manhattan Project, which was a huge
secret project that required tens of thousands of people to be working
in complete secrecy — and we actually built enormous cities [for the
project’s workers] … and no one knew they existed. You also had the so-called Ultra and Magic secret
[operations], the decoding of the Nazi and Japanese codes that required
an enormous number of people to be doing absolutely top secret work
that they did not reveal to anybody for decades. So, WWII created this
kind of infrastructure of the deep state, which increased and
consolidated during the Cold War.

What are the key institutions and players within the deep state?

The
key institutions are exactly what people would think they are. The
military-industrial complex; the Pentagon and all their contractors (but
also, now, our entire homeland security apparatus); the Department of
Treasury; the Justice Department; certain courts, like the southern
district of Manhattan, and the eastern district of Virginia; the FISA
courts. And you got this kind of rump Congress that consists of certain
people in the leadership, defense and intelligence committees who kind
of know what’s going on. The rest of Congress doesn’t really know or
care; they’re too busy looking about the next election.

So that’s the governmental aspect. What about in the private sector?

You’ve
got Wall Street. Many of these people — whether it is David Petraeus
… or someone like [Bill] Daley, who is the former chief of staff
to President Obama … or Hank Paulson, who came from Goldman Sachs to
become Treasury Secretary and bailed out Wall Street in 2008; or the
people that Obama chose to be Treasury secretary — like Tim Geithner.
They all have that Wall Street connection. And the third thing now is Silicon Valley.

Oh? Why is Silicon Valley now so central?

Because
they generate so much money that they are rivaling and sometimes
surpassing Wall Street. The heads of Google or Apple make more money
than the guys running Wall Street. They make more money than Jamie
Dimon. So that’s the new source of cash to run the deep state.

Silicon
Valley provides a lot of money. But it also has access to an
unfathomable amount of information. Which do you think is more valuable
to the deep state — the cash or the info?

I think you can’t
distinguish the two. There is a tremendous amount of money coming, in
terms of lobbying, for Silicon Valley to get what it wants in terms of
intellectual property and so forth. At the same time, NSA insiders
have told me that they couldn’t even operate without the cooperation of
Silicon Valley, because the communication backbones that are set up and
operated by Silicon Valley provide the vast majority of
information that the NSA and other intelligence agencies are going to
exploit — and they can’t do it themselves. They need the willing or
unwilling cooperation of Silicon Valley.

But when the
Snowden leaks first hit, a lot of Silicon Valley elites implied they
didn’t knowingly or willingly work with the government, no?

There was a certain amount of deception there, after the Edward Snowden revelations. They claimed, Oh, well, the NSA made us do all these things! — but
not really, because NSA, CIA, and these other intelligence
organizations were also involved in giving seed money or subsidies to
various Silicon Valley companies to do these things.

Polls show that on the major issues of our time -- the Afghanistan
and Iraq wars, Wall Street bailouts and health insurance -- the opinion
of We the People has been ignored on a national level for quite
some time. While the corporate media repeats the myth that the United
States of America is a democracy, Americans, especially Wisonsiners and
Ohioans, know that this is a joke.

On March 3, 2011, a Rasmussen Reports
poll declared that "Most Wisconsin voters oppose efforts to weaken
collective bargaining rights for union workers." This of course didn't
stop Wisconsin Governor Walker and the Wisconsin legislature from passing a bill
that -- to the delight of America's ruling class -- trashed most
collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Similarly in
Ohio, legislation to limit collective bargaining rights for public
workers is on the verge of being signed into law by Governor Kasich,
despite the fact that Public Policy Polling on March 15, 2011 reported that 54 percent of Ohio voters would repeal the law, while 31 percent would keep it.

It is a myth that the United States of America was ever a democracy
(most of the famous founder elite such as John Adams equated democracy
with mob rule and wanted no part of it). The United States of America
was actually created as a republic, in which Americans were supposed to
have power through representatives who were supposed to actually
represent the American people. The truth today, however, is that the
United States is neither a democracy nor a republic. Americans are ruled
by a corporatocracy: a partnership of "too-big-to-fail" corporations,
the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government
officials.

The reality is that Americans, for quite some time, have opposed the U.S. government's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but We the People have zero impact on policy. On March 10-13, 2011, an ABC News/Washington Post
poll asked, "All in all, considering the costs to the United States
versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war in
Afghanistan has been worth fighting, or not?"; 64 percent said "not
worth fighting" and 31 percent said "worth fighting." A February 11,
2011, CBS poll
reported Americans' response to the question, "Do you think the U.S. is
doing the right thing by fighting the war in Afghanistan now, or should
the U.S. not be involved in Afghanistan now?"; only 37 percent of
Americans said the U.S. "is doing the right thing" and 54 percent said
we "should not be involved." When a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll
on December 17-19, 2010, posed the question, "Do you favor or oppose
the U.S. war in Afghanistan?" only 35 percent of Americans favored the
war while 63 percent opposed it. For several years, the majority of
Americans have also opposed the Iraq war, typified by a 2010 CBS poll
which reported that 6 out of 10 Americans view the Iraq war as "a
mistake."

The opposition by the majority of Americans to current U.S. wars has
remained steady for several years. However, if you watched only the
corporate media's coverage of the 2010 election between Democratic and
Republican corporate-picked candidates, you might not even know that
America was involved in two wars -- two wars that are not only opposed
by the majority of Americans but which are also bankrupting America.

How about the 2008 Wall Street bailout? Even when Americans believed
the lie that it was only a $700 billion bailout, they opposed it; but
their opinion was irrelevant. In September 2008, despite the corporate
media's attempts to terrify Americans into believing that an economic
doomsday would occur without the bailout, Americans still opposed it. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll
in September 2008, asked, "Do you think the government should use
taxpayers' dollars to rescue ailing private financial firms whose
collapse could have adverse effects on the economy and market, or is it
not the government's responsibility to bail out private companies with
taxpayers' dollars?"; only 31 percent of Americans said we should "use
taxpayers" dollars while 55 percent said it is "not government's
responsibility." Also in September 2008, both a CBSNews/New York Times poll and a USA Today/Gallup poll
showed Americans opposed the bailout. This disapproval of the bailout
was before most Americans discovered that the Federal Reserve had loaned
far more money to "too-big-to-fail" corporations than Americans had
been originally led to believe (The Wall Street Journal
reported on December 1, 2010, "The US central bank on Wednesday
disclosed details of some $3.3 trillion in loans made to financial
firms, companies and foreign central banks during the crisis.")

What about health insurance? Despite the fact that several 2009 polls
showed that Americans actually favored a "single-payer" or
"Medicare-for-all" health insurance plan, it was not even on the table
in the Democrat-Republican 2009-2010 debate over health insurance reform
legislation. And polls during this debate showed that an even larger
majority of Americans favored the government providing a "public option"
to compete with private health insurance plans, but the public option
was quickly pushed off the table in the Democratic-Republican debate. A
July 2009 Kaiser Health Tracking poll
asked, "Do you favor or oppose having a national health plan in which
all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal
form of Medicare-for-all?" In this Kaiser poll, 58 percent of Americans
favored a Medicare-for-all universal plan, and only 38 percent opposed
it -- and a whopping 77 percent favored "expanding Medicare to cover
people between the ages of 55 and 64 who do not have health insurance." A
February 2009 CBS News/New York Times poll reported that 59 percent of Americans say the government should provide national health insurance. And a December 2009 Reuters poll
reported that, "Just under 60 percent of those surveyed said they would
like a public option as part of any final healthcare reform
legislation."

In the U.S. corporatocracy, as in most modern tyrannies, there are
elections, but the reality is that giant corporations and the wealthy
elite rule in a way to satisfy their own self-interest. In elections in a
corporatocracy, as is the case in elections in all tyrannies, it's in
the interest of the ruling class to maintain the appearance
that the people have a say, so more than one candidate is offered up. In
the U.S. corporatocracy, it's in the interest of corporations and the
wealthy elite that the winning candidate is beholden to them, so they
financially support both Democrats and Republicans. It's in the interest
of corporations and the wealthy elite that there are only two viable
parties--this cuts down on bribery costs. And it's in the interest of
these two parties that they are the only parties with a chance of
winning.

In the U.S. corporatocracy, corporations and the wealthy elite
directly and indirectly finance candidates, who are then indebted to
them. It's common for these indebted government officials to appoint to
key decision-making roles those friendly to corporations, including
executives from these corporations. And it's routine for high-level
government officials to be rewarded with high-paying industry positions
when they exit government. It's common and routine for former government
officials to be given high-paying lobbying jobs so as to use their
relationships with current government officials to ensure that corporate
interests will be taken care of.

The integration between giant corporations and the U.S. government
has gone beyond revolving doors of employment (exemplified by George W.
Bush's last Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, who had previously been
CEO of Goldman Sachs; and Barack Obama's first chief economic adviser,
Lawrence Summers who in 2008 received $5.2 million from hedge fund D. E.
Shaw). Nowadays, the door need not even revolve in the U.S.
corporatocracy; for example, when President Obama earlier in 2011
appointed General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as a key economic advisor,
Immelt kept his job as CEO of General Electric.

The United States is not ruled by a single deranged dictator but by
an impersonal corporatocracy. Thus, there is no one tyrant that
Americans can first hate and then finally overthrow so as to end
senseless wars and economic injustices. Revolutions against Qaddafi-type
tyrants require enormous physical courage. In the U.S. corporatocracy,
the first step in recovering democracy is the psychological courage to
face the humiliation that we Americans have neither a democracy nor a
republic but are in fact ruled by a partnership of "too-big-to-fail"
corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator
government officials.

Call it Crony Capitalism, or the 1% versus the 99%, or the the tension between Wall Street
and Main Street: One of the major themes in America today is how the
wealthy use their money and position to influence policy and the idea of
success. The accepted notion that our capitalist democratic system is
excessively deferential to people with money will be the theme of
President Obama’s State of the Union speech this coming week. It is the
theme of the Pope’s 2014 message to the world, and was a major topic of
conversation in Davos last week. And it is in the looking glass of
progressive folk around politics like Sen. Elizabeth Warren,
members of the academy as well as the media. And it isn’t going away.
Think of it. Fifty years after LBJ called for a war to eradicate
poverty, there are 47 million people using food stamps to provide food
for their families. The true rate of unemployment, if you add in those
no longer looking for a job, is probably 12-13%. And there are millions
of families with income around $26,000 a year, which is the cutoff point
for being considered in poverty.

By now most Americans who read the press are aware that the top 1% of
Americans are pulling away from the 99%. The top 1% grew their incomes
by 86.1% since 1933; the top 5%, or 15 million individuals, have seen
their incomes rise while everyone else is flat to down. But the real
plutocrats are the top 1/10th of 1%: the 350,000 individuals that
receive 11.33% of overall income. At the very peak are the 1/100th of
1%: the 35,000 individuals with 5.47% of overall income. This is the
amazing cohort at the very peak of our economy, and I believe they, or
others who will replace them, are likely to receive these benefits well
into the future. I don’t rightly see what countervailing power there is
to reduce their take or level it out. They are the individuals with
foundations, hedge funds, private equity firms and social media magnates
who are the new symbols of financial firepower. They help make
Presidents, defeat or pass special legislation, build hospitals, museum
wings, endow universities, libraries, music halls and more.

I’d say whatever corruption of the political process is believed to
happen is overshadowed by charitable philanthropy and the creation and
support of good works NGOs. That’s why I reckon proposals to raise taxes
seriously on the 1% are going to fall on deaf ears from the power
center of the nation. At most, the capital gains tax might be nudged a
bit higher and the deduction for interest on mortgages perhaps capped.
But then again, maybe not, due to the very influence of effective
lobbyists in this ever-growing pot of money.

In short, we’re bound to always have the Koch brothers and the
Sheldon Adelsons who spent more on 2012 elections than the citizens of
12 states taken together. I don’t think you can reverse this trend
unless there is another economic and financial disaster that wipes out a
good portion of these obscene fortunes held by several of the 1%.
(Gates and Buffett and their ilk excluded) Those with the outsize
fortunes are bound to have the outsize influence to influence public
policy. What does need to be slowed down is the ability of the 1% to
mobilize the distribution of even more resources to themselves. For the
mobility of the 39% is at stake in the U.S. As Sen. Marco Rubio put it
the other day — and he is no lefty, progressive ‘tax the rich’ fellow —
“It is the lack of mobility, not just income inequality that should be
focused on.” On Tuesday night, we’ll find out if the President has any
fresh, innovative, credible programs to achieve that end.

The story from Wisconsin concerns the secret signing of two laws, which Common Cause of Wisconsin called
an “assault on democracy in Wisconsin,” that “sets good government back
to the 19th Century,” while Rep. Terese Berceau, a Democrat, earlier called the bills nothing short of “an effort to create a permanent one-party state.” The
story out of Michigan is about the sort of dire consequences that can
come from such crippling of democracy: specifically, how the state, via
the dictatorial rule of an appointed “emergency manager,” actively, horrificallypoisoned the young children of Flint with lead, leading the mayor to declare a state of emergency
in hopes of getting the state and federal assistance her citizens so
desperately need. It wasn’t just the young children, of course, but
young children are the ones most heavily impacted, their thinking
ability impaired for the rest of their lives. The story from Flint is
most shocking and devastating, but it cannot be understood outside of
the larger framework, which is why I’ll turn to the Wisconsin story
first, where that framework itself is the story, and deal with Flint’s
story in a followup.

First,
a short note about what I mean by “Dixiefication.” It’s a complex
process—economically, a regressive shift toward low-wage, deregulated
oligopoly; culturally, an anti-modernist shift toward backwards-looking,
fear-infused myth and fantasy obsession; politically, an authoritarian
shift toward culture war, demonization, exclusion, and erosion of
accountability. It’s been reflected in both states in a variety of
ways—for example, both Michigan and Wisconsin have become so-called “right to work” states since 2010—a hallmark anti-labor measure pioneered in the South, which severely weakens both the bargaining power and political influence of unions. But
what most clearly situated their Dixiefication in national politics was
their key roles in the extreme anti-democratic gerrymandering that
helped the GOP keep control of the House in 2012, despite losing the
popular vote for House seats by more than half a million votes—which at the same time gave them a stranglehold on state government ever since.

From Union-Busting to Election-Busting

Although
other aspects were also present, in Wisconsin its dynamic was centrally
driven by its core economic logic, a drive toward a corporate-friendly,
low-wage, Deep South-style economy, as described by Ed Kilgore in relationship to Governor Scott Walker’s purported “budget bill”
aimed at crippling public employee unions. That bill began the story,
which culminated in the recent secret bill signings giving free rein to
political corruption in Wisconsin—another common feature of
Dixiefication. The budget bill sparked massive protests and a powerful recall movement, which Walker survived with massive outside spending assistance
from dark-money groups, which in turn led to a judge-supervised, grand
jury-like “John Doe” investigation looking into potentially illegal
coordination and campaign contributions between Walker’s campaign with
outside dark money groups. The probe was halted last July by a controversial 4-2 decision
by the ethically compromised Wisconsin Supreme Court, which effectively
gutted Wisconsin campaign finance law. Two of the justices involved had
received substantial support from Walker’s backers, but refused to
recuse themselves from the case—a further demonstration of Wisconsin’s
rapid slide into corruption.

In 1907, Congress banned corporate
contributions to federal candidates in the wake of the robber baron-era
scandals. In 1947, the ban was formally applied to corporate
expenditures and extended to cover labor unions. In
1974, Congress enacted limits on individual contributions to federal
candidates and political committees in the wake of the Watergate
scandal. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United case
declared the corporate expenditure ban unconstitutional, holding that
independent expenditures could not be constitutionally limited in
federal elections, and implicitly that corporations could give unlimited
amounts to other groups to spend, as long as the expenditures were made
independently from the supported candidate. Subsequently, the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the SpeechNow case held that the limits on individual contributions to groups that made independent expenditures were unconstitutional.

Thus was born the super PAC.

And thus was born the national campaign finance scandals that are unfolding daily in the 2012 elections. Super
PACs are federally registered political action committees that raise
unlimited contributions from the super rich, corporations, labor unions
and other entities and spend these funds to make "independent"
expenditures in federal elections. They are an unmitigated disaster for the American people. A recent study by Demos and the U.S. Public Interest Group found that, as Politico reported,
"Super PACs raised about $181 million in the last two years -- with
roughly half of it coming from fewer than 200 super-rich people." The
study also found that 93% of the itemized contributions raised by super
PACs came in contributions of $10,000 or more, with more than half of
this money coming from just 37 people who each gave $500,000 or more.

Super
PACs are a game for millionaires and billionaires. They are a game for
corporations and other wealthy interests. Meanwhile, citizens are pushed
to the sidelines to watch the corruption of our democracy. In
the 2012 presidential election, an even more insidious version of the
super PAC was born -- the candidate-specific super PAC. Every
significant presidential campaign has had a super PAC -- created and
run by close associates of the candidate -- that raises unlimited
contributions to spend only to support that presidential candidate. Presidential
candidate-specific super PACs are simply vehicles for the presidential
candidates and their supporters to circumvent the limits on
contributions to candidates enacted to prevent corruption. Most of the
super PAC money has been spent on attack ads.

We already have seen Sheldon Adelson and his wife give $10 million to the presidential super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich. One couple! $10 million! The
claim that these presidential super PACs are operating "independently"
from the presidential candidates, as is required by law, is absurd and
has no credibility. Last week,
President Barack Obama reversed course and agreed to send Cabinet
members, White House staff and campaign officials to speak at and
participate in fundraising events for Priorities USA Action,
the allegedly "independent" super PAC supporting Obama's re-election.
Days later, Mitt Romney's campaign announced that senior Romney
campaign aides would do the same and appear and speak at fundraising
events for Restore Our Future, Romney's allegedly "independent" super
PAC.

Sound independent?

According
to the Supreme Court's view, a corporation that spends $30 million to
elect a senator will not be able to buy corrupting influence over the
senator's positions because the corporation has not "coordinated" its
expenditures with the senator. Democracy
21 believes these super PACs are indeed engaging in illegally
coordinated activities and is requesting the Justice Department to
investigate. Super PACs corrupt our political system in two ways. First,
super PACs allow a relatively few super-rich individuals and other
wealthy interests to have greatly magnified and undue influence over the
results of our elections. Second,
super PACs allow the super rich and wealthy interests to buy influence
over government decisions, in the event the candidate wins.

The
Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case that unleashed this
is built entirely on a fiction: that "independent" expenditures by
corporations cannot have a corrupting influence on federal
officeholders. This is fantasy, not reality. Important
steps can and must be taken to deal with candidate-specific super PACs
within the boundaries of the destructive Citizens United decision. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, has introduced the DISCLOSE 2012 Act
to close gaping loopholes in the disclosure laws. It requires super
PACs immediately to disclose their donors and campaign expenditures, and
requires the PACs' top five donors, and the amounts they gave, to be
listed on each of their ads. This legislation is essential to inform
citizens about who is providing the money to influence their votes.

In
addition, Democracy 21 is preparing legislation to shut down super PACs
that are closely tied to the candidate they are supporting. The
legislation would treat these super PACs legally as arms of the
candidate's campaign and subject to the contribution limits that apply
to the candidate. Five Supreme Court
justices have done enormous damage to our country with one of the worst
decisions in the history of the court. This will not be allowed to stand. Citizens
will rise up to demand and achieve fundamental reforms, as we have
before when threatened with the systemic corruption of our government
and officeholders.

Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the money to capture the White House

They
are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male,
in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black
and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an
archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of
cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a
dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two:
finance and energy. Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the
political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to
support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families,
along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in
the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found.
Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so
much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized
by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

These donors’ fortunes reflect the shifting
composition of the country’s economic elite. Relatively few work in the
traditional ranks of corporate America, or hail from dynasties of
inherited wealth. Most built their own businesses, parlaying talent and
an appetite for risk into huge wealth: They founded hedge funds in New
York, bought up undervalued oil leases in Texas, made blockbusters in
Hollywood. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the
United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet
Union, Pakistan, India and Israel. But regardless of industry, the families investing
the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right,
contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican
candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income,
capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs. While
such measures would help protect their own wealth, the donors describe
their embrace of them more broadly, as the surest means of promoting
economic growth and preserving a system that would allow others to
prosper, too.

Out
of the guts of the internet, we find an endless stream of
misattributed quotes and made-up stories that end up in chain emails
that you eventually receive from your loopy uncle in Texas who's trying
to justify right-wing economics or anti-Obama conspiracy theories. It's
just one of the headaches of the Internet Age. But, there's one quote in
particular that's always attributed to an
obscure Scottish historian, Sir Alexander Frasier Tytler (as if that
gave it great credibility), and it seemed to both make sense and
prophecy the end of the American Republic.

Tytler was supposed to have said: "A democracy cannot exist as a
permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters
discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury.
From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising
the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a
democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a
dictatorship." Tyltler goes on to talk about the process by which democracies fail as a result of this "voter selfishness."

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two
hundred years," he was rumored to have said. "These nations have
progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from
spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from
liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to
complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again to bondage."

Now, here's the reality: Tytler never said any of these words. They
can all be tracked back to right-wing American businessmen in the early
decades of the twentieth century. And why would right-wing businessmen
say such things? Because, in actual point of fact, the thing that
corrupts democracies is not "the voters" demanding "free stuff" (to
paraphrase Romney), but, instead, its businessmen buying off
politicians. It's not the powerless who corrupt democracies, as that viral
right-wing quote would suggest; it's the powerful who corrupt
democracies. And money is the source of that power.

Yes, over the last hundred years, average American people have voted
themselves benefits like Social Security, unemployment insurance,
Medicare, and Medicaid. But at the same time, they've also supported tax
increases to pay for all of these things. Remember, the Social Security
tax only applies to the first $113,000 of wages - earned income. People
like Paris Hilton and Mitt Romney, when they get all their money from
capital gains, dividends, and carried interest, don't pay a penny of
Social Security taxes on their millions of income. And the average top
CEO in America, with an income of $13.7 million a year, over a million a
month, only pays Social Security taxes on his first few days of income
every year - every other day is Social Security tax-free. Quite
literally, as Leona Helmsley famously said, only the "little people" pay
such taxes. The safety net program for working class people is
exclusively paid for by working class people.

On the other hand, when the Billionaire Class extracts benefits from
the government for themselves, the generally don't pay higher taxes. The
billions in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil, trillions in bailouts and
bonuses for Wall Street banksters, and hundreds of billions for war
profiteers are always accompanied by demands for more tax cuts at the
top.

And, truth be told, billionaires aren't even receiving these benefits
by voting for them. Instead, they always get them through the simple
process of buying politicians. For example, Sheldon Adelson spent $150 million
in the last election. That's more than any American spent in any
election in American history. And he spent all that money to give
himself the "benefits" of derailing an Obama Justice Department
investigation into his casino in China and to get his taxes cut even
further.

Billionaires also corrupt democracy to get their benefits through
billionaire-funded think tanks, like the Koch-funded American
Legislative Exchange Council that writes legislation to benefit
Corporate America, and then has Republicans state lawmakers introduce
and pass laws in state after state, across the nation. But despite this very clear reality of who is demanding largesse from
our government, it's still working people and average voters who are
targeted by right-wingers and their viral emails as the selfish
"takers." That's the reason why the Business Roundtable
is saying the best way to fix insurance programs like Social Security
and Medicare is to raise the retirement age to 70 and voucherize
Medicare.

Of course, the average CEO for an S&P 500 company doesn't need
Social Security. But they know that by raising the retirement age,
they're shielding themselves from any tax increases that may come with
raising that payroll tax cap, so even billionaires pay into Social
Security, which will quickly and easily make that insurance program
solvent forever. America's fiscal problems have nothing to do with voters. In fact,
the Billionaire Class is trying to make it harder and harder for people
to vote by pushing for voter suppression ID laws and restrictions on
early voting.

America's fiscal problems are a direct result of the Billionaire
Class working behind the scenes of our democracy and syphoning off
massive amounts of wealth for themselves while paying lower taxes than
they've paid in a half-century. As Senator Bernie Sanders points out,
a quarter of all profitable corporations in America pay zero federal
taxes. And Mitt Romney and Paris Hilton's income tax rates top out at 20
percent.

Tytler didn't really say those words that the Billionaire Class
think-tanks and email shills attribute to him. But, had he said them, he
probably would have something more along the lines of this: "A
democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the billionaires discover that they can steal for themselves largess of the public treasury through buying politicians. From that time on the billionaires will always buy candidates promising them
the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a
democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a
dictatorship."

If we are concerned about the future of our American democratic
republic, the way to preserve it isn't to protect it from greedy Social
Security recipients by pushing the retirement age back to 70. It's to
get money out of government, thus neutering the political power of the
Billionaire Class. And that means reversing two core doctrines that the
US Supreme Court has created out of thin air (at the request of big
business and billionaires): that corporations are people, and that money
is speech. The best way to do that is through a constitutional amendment that
says corporations are not people, and money is property and not speech.

Money cannot always buy election
results; weak candidates often lose even when they outspend their
opponents. Nor is outright bribery very common; elected officeholders
rarely sell specific votes directly Yet the perfectly legal flood of
money that pervades American politics has fundamentally corrupting
effects.The effects of money are manifold, subtle, and
hard to pin down, but a number of pathways of influence can be laid out.
Most are based on judgments about the best available evidence, short of
irrefutable proof. But on certain key points the quantitative evidence
is fairly conclusive. Political scientist Gary Jacobson and other
scholars have pinned down how monetary advantages affect chances of
winning congressional elections Large amounts of money are virtually
essential if a candidate is to have any serious chance of winning.
Inability to raise big money leads to losing general elections, losing
party nominations, or giving up even before getting started. Thus the
need to raise money acts as a filter, tending to eliminate public
officials who hold certain points of view – even points of view that are
popular with most Americans.

The need for money tends to filter out centrist candidates.
Most congressional districts are gerrymandered to ensure a big
advantage for one party or the other, so that election outcomes are
actually decided in low-salience, low-turnout, one-party primary
elections. Primaries are usually dominated by ideological party
activists and money givers, who tend to hold extreme views and to reject
all but the purest partisan candidates. This contributes to party
polarization and legislative gridlock in Congress.

The need for money filters out candidates on the economic left.
Democratic as well as Republican candidates have to raise big money,
most of which comes from economically successful entrepreneurs and
professionals who tend to hold rather conservative views on taxes,
social welfare spending, and economic regulation. As a result, few
candidates whose views are not broadly acceptable to the affluent are
nominated or elected.

The quest for money tilts candidates' priorities and policy stands.
Countless hours spent grubbing for money from affluent contributors
changes candidates' priorities and sense of constituent needs. As they
speak with potential donors, candidates hear repeatedly about resentment
of progressive taxes and "wasteful" social spending. Special tax breaks
for corporations and hedge fund managers start to sound reasonable.

Affluent citizens get extra influence by turning out to vote, working in campaigns, and contacting officials.
Campaign contributions are not the only way in which affluent people
get involved in politics; these same people tend to be active in other
ways too, underscoring their importance to candidates.

Money can tip the outcome of close elections.
Money spent on media, organizing, and turnout tends to increase vote
totals, giving a significant advantage to candidates favored by money
givers.

Money buys access to officials. When big
contributors contact officials they tend to get attention. Their
economic resources enable them to get a hearing, to offer help with
information and expertise – even to draft bills. Research shows that
these processes boost the influence of the affluent on the policy topics
and ideas officeholders consider, biasing the public agenda toward the
concerns of the affluent.

The quest for re-election money affects officials' priorities and policy stands.
From the moment they win office, candidates look ahead to the money
they must raise for reelection, and this is bound to steal time from
official duties and slant their attention toward constituents who are
substantial donors.

In sum, the net effects of money in politics
include distraction from the public business, exacerbation of
polarization and gridlock, and distortion of policy making in wasteful,
inefficient, and anti-democratic directions. These are not trivial costs
to American democracy, and their impact raises the obvious question:
what can be done? There is little immediate prospect for a Supreme
Court decision or Constitutional amendment to reduce the impact of
money on politics. But the effects of big private money could be greatly
diluted through public funding – for example, by letting all citizens
contribute with "democracy vouchers" (as legal expert Larry Lessig has
proposed) or instituting some other system of matching small
contributions. To make something like this happen – over the likely
resistance of wealthy big contributors – would require a broad,
bipartisan social movement. Citizens of various ideological persuasions
would have to join together, much as Americans once did in broad reform
movements during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century.

Benjamin Page is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University. Click here to learn more about Ben's research and advocacy.

One would hope that the crazy
behavior shown by some Republicans in the U.S. House would be mitigated
with the next election cycle by turning these obstructionists out of
office and replacing them with more level headed adults. But don’t hold
your breath. The fact is that
so many U.S. House districts have been gerrymandered so badly that it is
impossible to change the structure of the House without either changing
the outlines of the districts or changing the perspective of the voters
that keep sending them to Washington.

A casual look at a district map will
show you that if you took a twenty five square mile area that contained
10,000 eligible voters, that square has been so gerrymandered that you
have only thirty percent of the voters in that square holding all of the
power while the other seventy percent have been alienated. It puts a
lie to American democracy. It would be as if the
entire state of Wyoming were a single district but only Cheyenne and
Gillette got to choose who we send to Washington. It is inherently
wrong. So that leaves trying to
get those few voters that hold all of the power to cast off their dogma
and really look at what’s in the best interest of the nation. I hope
that one day, before those extremist representatives have so fouled up
this country that a Gordian knot would be simpler to unravel, these
voters see how they are being manipulated by the entrenched corporate
entities that are behind the tea party movement.

Remember the old adage of, `follow
the money’. Ask yourself who has been making money under the current
health care system? Insurance companies for sure. Medical device
manufacturers for another. These are the people opposing the Affordable
Care Act and they’ve hoodwinked conservative voters into believing many
of their lies while their puppets in Congress make fools of themselves
and risk the future of America just to keep the money flowing. No,
we won’t see House districts changing anytime soon and we won’t see
these corporate tools thrown out of Congress. It’s sad to think that
such a small portion of the nation's voters can bring the entire thing
down. Such is a republic.

America was once a world leader in democracy, with innovations like
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of
Rights. While the early republic had major flaws, our nation was
nonetheless an innovator in democracy at a time when monarchies ruled.
Since that time, many nations have adopted the American principles of
separation of powers in government but they have avoided many of the
idiosyncrasies in the American system. Most modern democracies avoid
our single-seat winner take-all-elections, using some form of
proportional representation instead. No modern democracy has adopted the
American system that denies citizens in their national capital the
right to have a voting representative in Congress. For the purposes of
this article, I will focus on the fact that no other country uses our
anti-democratic Electoral College.

Often when I discuss the Electoral College with Americans who don't
spend much time thinking about politics, they suggest, "it's been
working for hundreds of years, so whatever problems it has are probably
not so bad." This reflects a basic pattern in American society where we
want the latest technology for our computers, televisions and cell
phones but we complacently trudge along using archaic voting technology
while ignoring the improvements that have occurred since the late 1700s.
Defenders of the status quo start to perk up when I mention that the
Electoral College makes it possible to capture the presidency by winning
only eleven states and disregarding the rest of the country or that
four times the presidential candidate that won the popular vote lost the
election. When I remind them that no country uses the Electoral
College model for electing a leader, they start wondering what aspects
of the Electoral College are most problematic.

That is when I emphasize that, by design, the Electoral College
fundamentally undermines the basic principle of one citizen-one vote
mentioning democratic lowlights such as:(1) States with smaller populations have far more representatives per
population than states with larger populations. For example, residents
of the three least-populated states -- Wyoming, Vermont, and North
Dakota -- have one congressional representative for every 200,000
people, while those in the three states with the highest population --
California, Texas, and New York -- have only one congressional member
for every 670,000 people. This representational inequality clearly gives
citizens from small population states a much stronger voice per citizen
than those residing in large states when it comes to electing the
president (see graph).

(2) Forty-eight states allocate all of their Electors to one
candidate (Maine and Nebraska use proportional representation). This
state-level decision of how to allocate Electors produces the issue of
swing-state distortion, where citizens in states that are relatively
evenly split between the two parties have far more influence in
selecting the president than citizens in states where a majority are
clearly voting for one party. Moreover, citizens are often discouraged
to vote in presidential elections if they know that the allocation of
all of their state's electors is a foregone conclusion. Campaign
activity exemplifies the implications of this all-or-nothing allocation
issue and its egregious undermining of the principle of one citizen-one
vote. Candidates rarely invest campaign funds in states that aren't "in
play" -- i.e., states whose electoral votes are considered to be already
won or lost based on large margins of victory in previous elections and
on current polling. For example, in the 2008 presidential election, the
campaign of then-candidate Barack Obama spent nearly $40 million on
advertising in Pennsylvania, a swing state with twenty-one electoral
votes, and about $25,000 in Illinois, with an equivalent number of
electors. The Obama strategists knew that there was no reason to spend
any time courting voters in his home state, Illinois, since he would
clearly win the majority of Illinois's popular votes and all twenty-one
of its electoral votes. Republican and third-party supporters in
Illinois had no chance of having their voices heard and citizens living
in Illinois were being told very clearly that they are much less
important than those living in Pennsylvania.

(3) "Faithless" Electors: After all of the undermining of one
citizen-one vote that we described above, there is still the issue that
the Elector doesn't actually have to vote for whom they pledged. For
example, in 2000, D.C. elector Barbara Lett-Simmons abstained rather
than vote for Al Gore as she had pledged. Her feeble protest resulted in
silencing the voices of thousands of D.C. residents.

Few Americans would contend today that if we were designing a system
to elect a president from scratch, the Electoral College would be the
optimal solution. Using the popular vote would be the most obvious
choice and a majority of Americans support this change.
it would be easy to implement since the popular vote is already
counted and some variant of preferential voting could be introduced so
that third-parties can have a stronger voice.

Yet, inertia is a powerful force and so I don't anticipate America
discarding this system anytime soon. Until the time comes when America
drops the Electoral College or there is sufficient support for the
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, all states should mirror the
practice of Maine and Nebraska of allocating their electoral votes based
on proportional representation. This corrects the current
all-or-nothing system used in forty-eight of the fifty states and its
resulting overweighting or underweighting of votes based on whether or
not you live in a swing state. More importantly, it will force
candidates to take the votes of every American seriously, not just that
small percentage living in swing states. Unfortunately, self-interest
often trumps what is most fair or appropriate. Consequently, it is
unlikely that many other states will follow Maine and Nebraska's lead
since proportional allocation diminishes the power of the majority party
in the state and opens the opportunity for third parties to have a
stronger voice (an action that leadership in both the Democratic and
Republican parties wouldn't want).

Any grassroots candidate in the Democratic Party like Sanders
could be run out by the use of the undemocratic superdelegates system
which favors the party elite and Congress people, says Patrick
Henningsen from 21st Century Wire.com. Bernie
Sanders won the New Hampshire primary on February, 9 but due to
peculiarities in the Democratic National Committee’s method of assigning
delegates Hillary Clinton received the same number of delegates as
Sanders. "The difference between the Democrat and Republican
primaries is that in a DP primaries there are no winner takes all
states. They are all proportional. So, the delegates will be divided
proportionally. Each candidate has to be very aggressive in their
delegate strategy. And there is a number of superdelegates as well that
could decide this election - maybe for the first time since
superdelegates have come on the scene in the US electoral system on the
Democratic side. They could decide this election more than any other
election in the past. It could even go: Bernie Sanders could win the
popular vote and Hillary Clinton could win the delegate count based on
superdelegates. If we look the AP early polls showed that
superdelegates, 98 percent of them in early polling say they would vote
for Hillary Clinton, no matter what at the convention, as opposed to two
percent for Sanders. I mean, that could swing a ‘neck & neck’
election, come convention time", Patrick Henningsen told RT.

"In total I think for the Democratic Party there are 700
superdelegates, there are a number there pre-pledged to Hillary Clinton
absolutely. But there are also a number of undecided as well. The
problem with this and the big criticism about the superdelegates system
is that it is highly undemocratic. So, this is basically something that
came in as a result of George McGovern election in 1968; the McGovern
commission that came out of that came up with this plan which allow
people to think as outsiders. So, anybody like a grassroots candidate in
the Democratic Party like Sanders could be absolutely run out by the
use of the superdelegates system. It is undemocratic, it favors the
party elite, high party office holders within the Democratic hierarchy,
but also Congress people who get one superdelegate…one vote in real
terms is equal to 10,000 average American voters in a Democratic primary
if you map it out mathematically. It is ironic that the Democratic
Party would have such an undemocratic system factored into their sort of
party politics. Clearly, the Democratic Party elite are backing
Hillary because she is coming into this with her own power base which
she has accumulated over two decades. And also through her time in the
Senate and through past campaigns, and her husband, former president
Bill Clinton," he said.

Democracy, you could argue, is pretty much like sunshine, cold beer and ice cream. They’re all great - until you have too much

Too
much Democracy? That’s not possible, is it? In fact it may be. Some
economists and political scientists are suggesting as much in the wake
of the Brexit vote
and the subsequent wave of “Leave the EU” sentiment that’s sweeping
across Europe. And you can look to a big honking use case right here in
the US to make that argument.

It’s
way too early to tell how Brexit will affect the economy of the UK at
this point — although early days have been rocky enough with the crashing pound, stumbling stock market, and political chaos.
But I would argue the biggest negative of Brexit will be the messiness
and uncertainty that ensues. The UK will be forced to rewrite tax rules,
as well as draft and implement new legislation. It will have to craft a
new relationship with Europe. And the UK will more than likely haggle
over referendums in Scotland and Northern Ireland. An OECD report says
Brexit could cost the UK 3.3% of its GDP by 2020.

Despite
those headaches and risks, “Leavers” across Europe have taken up the
call — including those in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary,
Austria and Finland. A Citibank note says “… political risks in Europe
are high and probably rising, in our view, and ‘referendum risk’
contributes significantly to these risks …” Those risks include outright
withdrawal from the EU, scuttling of EU policies, and shying away from
EU-centric policies that could bolster local economies. Citi notes that
Italy and Hungary will likely both have referendums on matters
pertaining to the EU this year. So
what does this have to do with the US, besides the collateral damage of
a potentially basket-case Europe — (no small thing that by the way)?
Because while referendums are actually rare in the UK, (the Brexit vote
is only the third to cover the whole UK), they are much more common in
the US.

Twenty-six states —
mostly Western ones — plus Washington D.C., allow for initiatives and
referendums. And over the years, there have been various successes and
failures, never mind wackiness. (One of my favorites was the 2006 Arizona Voter Reward Act
which would give a single Arizona citizen $1 million in every general
election. It was defeated.) But other ballot initiatives of course are
more serious and in some states referendums and such have had real
teeth. Nowhere more so than in California, where it has been elevated to
a powerful form of governance, with its high-profile Propositions. For
those of you old enough to remember, the watershed moment of the
California Proposition movement was 1978 with the passage of Proposition
13, which capped real estate taxes. (Remember Howard Jarvis — the
leader of the movement — on the cover of Time Magazine: Tax Revolt!)

The
success of that vote ushered in a golden age of referendums for the
Golden State, although that may be a mischaracterization. Since then the
state has voted on hundreds of referendums on gun control, abortion,
marijuana and the death penalty. But mostly the initiatives have tended
towards the fiscal, i.e., taxes, budgets and bond issues. To some this
has been a shining era of democracy. Others are not so sanguine, saying
Prop 13, for example, helped lead to the gutting of education budgets. One
thing that is undoubtedly true is that this so-called direct democracy
model has made governing more difficult. The Economist delved into this in great length in a 2011 special report:

“This
citizen legislature has caused chaos. Many initiatives have either
limited taxes or mandated spending, making it even harder to balance the
budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that they achieve the opposite of
their intent: for all its small-government pretensions, Proposition 13
ended up centralizing California’s finances, shifting them from local to
state government. Rather than being the curb on elites that they were
supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of special
interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are often
bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications. And
they have impoverished the state’s representative government. Who would
want to sit in a legislature where 70-90% of the budget has already
been allocated?”

The best
evidence of the effects of this dysfunction perhaps is that during this
period, California experienced a precipitous decline in its credit
rating. In 1980, California had a triple AAA rating. By the early 1990s
it had fallen to single A, and it bounced around that level for decades
until as recently as 2014, when it was the second-lowest rated state in the nation.
(This is a state of course with Silicon Valley, Hollywood, oil and gas,
timber, minerals and the richest farmland in the nation.) Say what you
will about Jerry Brown, (twice!) Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson,
but it ain’t all the governors’ fault. In fact it may be Jerry Brown’s
multi-term experience with government by referendum that has allowed him
get a handle on the state’s finances and help boost its credit rating back up to AA (from S&P), its highest rating since 2001. But that’s hardly consolation.

Direct
democracy does have a shining example of efficacy, and that is
Switzerland, though there certainly are reasons particular to that
country — homogeneity being one — that explain why it has worked there.Otherwise,
I would argue that direct democracy is best used sparingly, for local
initiatives perhaps. A big drawback of direct democracy is that those
who want change — no matter its validity — are much more fired up than
those who want to maintain the status quo, and therefore many more of
the “Changers” go to the polls, as was perhaps the case in the Brexit
vote. Think about the consequences of that.

I
know it sounds horribly anachronistic, but checks and balances,
branches of government, and slow, messy and deliberate governance
actually has its place. It is true that both in the case of Britain’s
relationship with the EU and with real estate taxes in California in the
1970s, real change was needed. In cases like this, and probably just in
general, politicians need to step up more briskly than they are
typically comfortable doing. But putting the onus all back on the people
may not be the answer. One thing’s for sure, it certainly has its
consequences.

The world is currently being shaken by tectonic changes almost too
numerous to count: the ongoing economic crisis is accelerating the
degradation of international governance and supranational institutions,
and both are occurring alongside a massive shift of economic and
political power to Asia. Less than a quarter-century after U.S.
political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of
history," we seem to have arrived at the dawn of a new age of social and
geopolitical upheaval.

Dramatically, the Arab world has been swept by a revolutionary
spring, though one that is rapidly becoming a chilly winter. Indeed,
for the most part, the new regimes are combining the old
authoritarianism with Islamism, resulting in further social stagnation,
resentment and instability. Even more remarkable, however, are the social — and antisocial —
grassroots demonstrations that are mushrooming in affluent Western
societies. These protests have two major causes.

First, social inequality has grown unabated in the West over the last
quarter-century, owing in part to the disappearance of the Soviet Union
and, with it, the threat of expansionist communism. The specter
of revolution had forced Western elites to use the power of the state
to redistribute wealth and nurture the growth of loyal middle classes.
But when communism collapsed in its Eurasian heartland, the West's rich,
believing that they had nothing more to fear, pressed to roll back
the welfare state, causing inequality to rise rapidly. This was
tolerable as long as the overall pie was expanding, but the global
financial crisis in 2008 ended that.

Second, over the past 15 years, hundreds of millions of jobs shifted
to Asia, which offered inexpensive and often highly skilled labor.
The West, euphoric from its victory over communism and its seemingly
unstoppable economic growth, failed to implement necessary structural
reforms, although Germany and Sweden were rare exceptions. Instead,
Western prosperity relied increasingly on debt.

But the economic crisis has made it impossible to maintain a good
life on borrowed money. Americans and Europeans are beginning
to understand that neither they, nor their children, can assume that
they will become wealthier over time. Governments now face the difficult task of implementing reforms that
will hit the majority of voters hardest. In the meantime, the minority
that has benefited financially over the past two decades is unlikely
to give up its advantages without a fight.

All of this can only weaken Western democracy's allure in countries
like Russia, where, unlike in the West or to a large extent the Arab
world, those who are organizing the massive demonstrations against
the government belong to the economic elite. Theirs is a movement
of political reform, demanding more freedom and government
accountability. It is not a social protest — at least not yet.

A few years ago, it was fashionable to worry about the challenge that
authoritarian-style capitalism — for example, in China, Singapore,
Malaysia or Russia — presented to Western democratic capitalism. Today,
the problem is not only economic.Western capitalism's model of a society based on near-universal
affluence and liberal democracy looks increasingly ineffective when
compared to the competition. Authoritarian countries' middle classes may
push their leaders toward greater democracy, as in Russia, but Western
democracies will also likely become more authoritarian.

Indeed, measured against today's standards, former French President
Charles de Gaulle, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
and former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower were comparatively
authoritarian leaders. The West will have to readopt such an approach or
risk losing out globally as its ultraright and ultraleft political
forces consolidate their positions and its middle classes begin
to dissolve.

We must find ways to prevent the political polarization that gave
rise to totalitarian systems — communist and fascist — in the 20th
century. Fortunately, this is possible. Communism and fascism were born
and took root in societies demoralized by war, which is why all steps
should be taken now to prevent the outbreak of war.

This is becoming particularly relevant today, as the smell of war
hangs over Iran. Israel, which is facing a surge of hostile sentiment
among its neighbors in the wake of their "democratic" upheavals, is not
the only interested party. Many people in the advanced countries,
and even some in Russia, look increasingly supportive of a war with
Iran, despite — or perhaps owing to — the need to address the ongoing
global economic crisis and failure of international governance.

At the same time, huge opportunities beckon in times of far-reaching
change. Billions of people in Asia have extricated themselves
from poverty. New markets and spheres for applying one's intellect,
education and talents are appearing constantly. The world's power
centers are beginning to counterbalance one another, undermining
hegemonic ambitions and heralding a creative instability based
on genuine multipolarity, with people gaining greater freedom to define
their fate in the global arena.Paradoxically, today's global changes and challenges offer
the potential for both peaceful coexistence and violent conflict.
Whether fortunately or not, it is up to us — alone — to determine which
future it will be.

THIS week the Obama administration is playing host to Xi Jinping,
China’s vice president and heir apparent. The world’s most powerful
electoral democracy and its largest one-party state are meeting at a
time of political transition for both. Many have characterized the competition between these two giants as a
clash between democracy and authoritarianism. But this is false. America
and China view their political systems in fundamentally different ways:
whereas America sees democratic government as an end in itself, China
sees its current form of government, or any political system for that
matter, merely as a means to achieving larger national ends.

In the history of human governance, spanning thousands of years, there
have been two major experiments in democracy. The first was Athens,
which lasted a century and a half; the second is the modern West. If one
defines democracy as one citizen one vote, American democracy is only
92 years old. In practice it is only 47 years old, if one begins
counting after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — far more ephemeral than
all but a handful of China’s dynasties. Why, then, do so many boldly claim they have discovered the ideal
political system for all mankind and that its success is forever
assured?

The answer lies in the source of the current democratic experiment. It
began with the European Enlightenment. Two fundamental ideas were at its
core: the individual is rational, and the individual is endowed with
inalienable rights. These two beliefs formed the basis of a secular
faith in modernity, of which the ultimate political manifestation is
democracy. In its early days, democratic ideas in political governance facilitated
the industrial revolution and ushered in a period of unprecedented
economic prosperity and military power in the Western world.

Yet at the
very beginning, some of those who led this drive were aware of the fatal
flaw embedded in this experiment and sought to contain it. The American Federalists made it clear they were establishing a
republic, not a democracy, and designed myriad means to constrain the
popular will. But as in any religion, faith would prove stronger than
rules. The political franchise expanded, resulting in a greater number of
people participating in more and more decisions. As they say in America,
“California is the future.” And the future means endless referendums,
paralysis and insolvency.

In Athens, ever-increasing popular participation in politics led to rule
by demagogy. And in today’s America, money is now the great enabler of
demagogy. As the Nobel-winning economist A. Michael Spence has put it,
America has gone from “one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one
vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.” By any
measure, the United States is a constitutional republic in name only.
Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to
the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election; special interests
manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher
government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.

The West’s current competition with China is therefore not a face-off
between democracy and authoritarianism, but rather the clash of two
fundamentally different political outlooks. The modern West sees
democracy and human rights as the pinnacle of human development. It is a
belief premised on an absolute faith.

China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater
popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive
to economic development and favorable to the country’s national
interests, as they have done in the past 10 years. However, China’s leaders would not hesitate to curtail those freedoms if
the conditions and the needs of the nation changed. The 1980s were a
time of expanding popular participation in the country’s politics that
helped loosen the ideological shackles of the destructive Cultural
Revolution. But it went too far and led to a vast rebellion at Tiananmen
Square.

That uprising was decisively put down on June 4, 1989. The Chinese
nation paid a heavy price for that violent event, but the alternatives
would have been far worse. The resulting stability ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity
that propelled China’s economy to its position as the second largest in
the world. The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is
whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute
or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on
the needs and conditions of the nation.

The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its
survival may depend on such a shift. In this sense, America today is
similar to the old Soviet Union, which also viewed its political system
as the ultimate end. History does not bode well for the American way. Indeed, faith-based
ideological hubris may soon drive democracy over the cliff.

Some
older readers may recall a statement by one of the self-described
“Velvet Revolutionaries” in Eastern Europe a quarter of a century ago,
to the effect that there is no such thing as proletarian democracy or
bourgeois democracy; rather, he said, there is just DEMOCRACY, plain and
simple. Unfortunately, my internet searches have not succeeded in
locating the exact quote, but it went like that. Back then one heard
many such statements. By 1990, Yerevantsi’s were fed up with high-handed
bosses who called themselves communists and claimed to rule in the name
of some higher form of democracy. They were fed up with one-party rule,
and they wanted responsive, representative leaders.

Democracy—and,
of course, Free Markets--were catchwords inscribed on the hearts of
protest leaders in Yerevan. At the same time, the protest leaders
insisted that the people of Soviet Armenia should not participate in the
Union-wide March 17, 1991 referendum on whether to keep their
confederation and reform it. Armenia abstained from the referendum, but
voting took place in nine of the fifteen Soviet republics, and by the
end of the process 76% of voters in those republics—an absolute majority
of eligible voters in the Soviet Union--opted to retain and reform the
union.

As we know, the August 18 coup, followed by Boris
Yeltsin’s counter-coup, scuttled the democratic decision. When Yeltsin
dismantled the Soviet Union in defiance of the expressed democratic will
of the referendum, he did so in the name of democracy.

Democracy-talk
served as a powerful ideological bulldozer to destroy the last remnants
of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But in the years
since then, surveys and studies have described a U-turn in public
opinion. As a Pew Global Attitudes report released in December 2011
stated, “Enthusiasm for democracy and capitalism has waned considerably
over the past 20 years, and most believe the changes that have taken
place since 1991 have had a negative impact on public morality, law and
order, and standards of living.”

In case after case, as we know,
the inflated hopes have shriveled, and the former Captive Nations have
ended up with capitalist bosses even more imperious than their Soviet
predecessors--and far less constructive. Two Czech writers recently
described the aftermath of their “Velvet Revolution” in terms that
Armenians will recognize:

After 25 years, Czech society finds
itself in crisis, yet the rest of the world seems not to know about it.
Few listen to the concerns of ordinary people. In 1989, most of them
believed that victory belonged to all. However, the narrative of the
Velvet Revolution serves today to maintain the truth of a very narrow
class of people who have made a new cult. The elites claim that there
has never been a better time than now and never will be. It makes sense
for them to say so. But we do not believe it. (Lukas Rychetshy
and Jaroslav Fiala, “Czech’s Look Back on 1989, a Revolution Betrayed,”
originally published in A2 Cultural Bi-Weekly, November 17, 2014.)

If citizens of the Czech Republic or the Republic of Armenia have lost
enthusiasm for democracy, this is because their thought-trainers in the
West have succeeded in neatly identifying democracy with capitalism. If
you succeed in convincing recently impoverished Armenians that there is
just democracy plain and simple, and that it must come with capitalism,
then a large number of them will conclude that it is not something worth
wishing for.

The resulting demoralization works to the benefit
of the rulers, since it leads those whom they rule to dial back their
expectations about democracy “plain and simple.” Demoralized people are
easier to rule. But what if another sort of democracy were possible?

Definitions of Democracy Differ

The
word democracy is certainly more ambiguous than the Velvet
Revolutionaries and their admirers in Yerevan had assumed. It does not
come pre-packaged with its own definite meaning, and it does not name
one and only one political setup. Consider, for example, the common
conception of democracy as majority rule. We know that this definition
does not stand up to the record: where, across the panorama of
democratic regimes today does the majority rule? Actually, it is
fortunate for minorities that majority rule has been so rare.

In
Azerbaijan and Armenia twenty-five years ago, self-described democratic
movements had no problem evicting Armenian and Azeri minorities from
their homes in these respective countries. These examples illustrate the
familiar view that democracy, conceived ONLY as rule by the majority,
opens the door to the abuse of minorities, whether national, ethnic, or
otherwise.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines democracy as “a
system of government in which all the people of a state or polity […]
have the right to take part or vote.” When we consider the cases of,
say, ancient Athens, the American South, and the apartheid Republic of
South Africa, we encounter the technical but crucial question: what
constitutes a “person”? Native birth, skin color, and ownership of
property have loomed large when it comes to citizenship and the
franchise. Gender, too: the United States of America, that
self-designated global custodian of democracy, had been in existence for
144 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment to its
constitution, extending voting rights to women. By contrast, Article 22
of the first Soviet Constitution had established the right of women to
vote two years earlier, right after the October Revolution.

If
democracy is the rule of the many, then what are we to make of the
constitutional “checks and balances” in the most powerful states today?
The framers of the U.S. Constitution, a document that was widely
admired as a prototype of other constitutions, were profoundly opposed
to majority rule, to the detriment of “the minority of the opulent,” as
James Madison, “the father of the American constitution,” put it. To
this day, democracy in the United States of America is not EVEN the rule
of the majority.

American-style democracy has lost much of its
glitter these days. Judging from the proposals to reform Armenia’s
constitution along parliamentary lines, our compatriots today are more
likely to look to Europe for their democratic models than to the United
States.

The Appeal of Western Democracy

What
Armenians admire most about liberal democracies in the West are such
things as their alleged emphases on limited government, “rule of law,”
civil liberties, individual rights, due process, and accountability, as
well as their smoothly functioning judiciaries, the right of appeal, and
so on. But let us not forget that, with few exceptions, these features
of the most admired political systems and political cultures in the West
have, with few exceptions, been wrenched by force from resistant
capitalist rulers, thanks to pressure from below: the abolition of
child labor, the right of workers to bargain collectively, the
eight-hour work day, universal suffrage, consumer safety legislation,
civil rights gains, safeguards for individual liberties, social
security, and one thousand other achievements—none of these were the
concessions of soft-hearted rulers; rather, they were the results of
stubborn popular resistance to those rulers.

In country after
country, thousands of people lost their lives in these struggles. When
this resistance has been sustained, it has typically developed in the
direction of greater self-organization by workers, farmers, former
slaves, women, and civil rights advocates. But as soon as the pressure
from below has ebbed, the achievements have disappeared, one after the
other.

Democracy for Whom?

We have seen that
there is no such thing as democracy plain and simple. But who defines
democracy? It seems that this, too, is a stake of political struggle,
of class struggle. We have witnessed what happens when organized
resistance recedes in countries like the United States of America, as
wages have slipped, the super-rich have become enormously richer,
personal freedoms have eroded, and state agencies have subverted
democratic rights and the last vestiges of privacy. And we have seen
what has happened in countries like Armenia when workers are stripped of
every last remnant of institutional power. No number of constitutional
provisions or checks and balances can safeguard the achievements of
liberal democracy without organized vigilance from below.

Here,
at long last, we have a lesson that regular folks in Armenia can
profitably learn from the West: if one day Armenia is to obtain the
kind of democracy that will redound to the benefit of most of its
citizens, then the least advantaged of them will have to come together,
organize themselves independently, and fight for the democratic and
civil rights they claim. And after that, they will have to fight to
defend and extend those rights.

There
are reasons to believe that if we reach far enough, this goal is not
beyond our grasp. For one thing, the numbers are there: In Armenia,
households headed by wage earners, the unemployed, the underemployed,
the self-employed, small farmers, and people on fixed income make up a
large majority demographic. If small business owners join this
alliance, then we have a potential constituency for a very broadly based
democracy.

The big capitalists that have been ruling Armenia
for the past twenty-five years have diminished the population,
dispossessed and impoverished the majority, debased the security and
status of women, depleted large swaths of the forests and water, and
otherwise despoiled the country.

Unfortunately, this ruling class
is not likely to give up state power unless it is forced to do so. To
challenge it will require organizing along working-class lines. To this
end, Armenia needs militant unions and a party of labor that is willing
and able to defend the rights of minorities while fighting for a
democracy of the working class majority.

Adults in Yerevan these days seem to have doubts about the word
democracy. In view of the record, this is not surprising. But the doubt
comes with its own dangers, including the danger of masking a very
different sort of democracy from the sort that exists in Armenia. The doubt has been a while coming, and it was born in part by
confusion. A focus-group survey conducted fifteen years ago by a
Washington-based foundation concluded that, “Democracy is a hard concept
to understand in Armenia today. It means many things to many different
people.” (Thomas Carson and Gevork Pogosian, “Public Attitudes toward
Political Life,” International Foundation for Election Systems, August,
2000, p. 21)

Participants in the survey described democracy variously as
“conducting free elections,” “protection of rights and freedoms” of
citizens, and even state provision of “equal financial conditions for
everyone.” No wonder, then, that it has been so hard to understand what
Armenians have meant by “democracy.”

Democracy-Talk Has Lost Its “Wow-Power”

According to the survey report, a majority of the target population
had by then come to associate democracy with “bad economic conditions,
unemployment, and lower standards of living.” After noting low voter
turnout, the authors wrote that, “The main reason many do not
participate in elections is the belief that their vote does not
count.” “As proof of this claim,” they wrote, “participants pointed to
the unexpected (and popularly rejected) results of the 1996 and 1998
Presidential elections” in Armenia. (Carson and Pogosian, p. 3)

The career of the first President of the Third Republic of Armenia
shadowed that of Russia’s first post-Soviet President, Boris Yeltsin,
and both account for the waning fortunes of democracy-talk in Armenia.
After the grotesque 1996 presidential election in Russia and the
contested reelection that same year of Levon Ter-Petrosyan,
democracy-talk lost its “wow-power”, just as the 1998 devaluation of the
Ruble flopped a wet blanket on the Free Market fever. And so it was
that the counterrevolutionary figureheads who captured power in Moscow
and Yerevan in 1991 relinquished their respective offices in 1998,
without much in the way of public regret. By that time, though, the damage had been done. David Satter, a
senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, writing in the
conservative Wall Street Journal, described the consequences of the
victory of Democracy in Russia:

Between 1992 and 1994, the rise in the death rate in Russia was so
dramatic that Western demographers did not believe the figures. The toll
from murder, suicide, heart attacks and accidents gave Russia the death
rate of a country at war; Western and Russian demographers now agree
that between 1992 and 2000, the number of “surplus deaths” in
Russia–deaths that cannot be explained on the basis of previous
trends–was between five and six million persons. (http://www.hudson.org/research/4893-boris-yeltsin; accessed April 8, 2015)

Within roughly the same range of years the average life expectancy of
a Russian male fell from 65 to 57.5 years. Even the likes of the
anti-Soviet journalist Paul Klebnikov described Yeltsin’s legacy as “one
of the most corrupt regimes in history.”No wonder, then, that by the
time Yeltsin left office, he had an approval rating of 2%. (CNN,
2002) But by that time it didn’t matter: “democracy” had stolen the
election from the Communist candidate in Russia, reinstated a pliant
client in Yerevan, and advanced the interests of Berlin and Washington.

Since then, contested elections have continued apace in Yerevan as in
Moscow, and more recent surveys have indicated that the disillusionment
has only deepened. Instead of the promised Free Market prosperity,
privatization plunged most inhabitants into abject poverty; unemployment
soared, and Armenia slid into years of recession, from which the
country had not yet emerged before it felt the effects of Western
sanctions against Russia and falling oil prices. Between rigged
elections and economic ruination, the street-level euphoria about
Democracy and Free Markets went the way of Vano Siradeghian.

Democracy as a Cloak for Class Rule

One of the most salient functions of democratic institutions these
days—electoral arrangements, legislatures, constitutional set-ups, and
so-forth—is their powerful role in legitimizing plutocracy. Democratic
institutions function to legitimize the rule of capitalists as a class
the way divine right used to justify the king’s absolute authority in
the Middle Ages.

Indeed, as the eminent Canadian political thinker C.B. Macpherson
noted in his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, “The concept
of a liberal democracy became possible only when theorists—first a few
and then most liberal theorists—found reasons for believing that ‘one
man, one vote’ would not be dangerous to property, or to the continuance
of class-divided societies.” Over the course of the last two
centuries, democracy itself has been defined and redefined in keeping
with the practices that have proven effective in this legitimating
function. Where “rule by the many” has not been conducive to capitalist
class rule—such as workplace democracy--it has been rejected. In such
supposedly exemplary democracies as the United States of America, for
example, democracy goes hand in hand with the power of Corporate America
over “the people.”

Democracy, then, legitimizes
established political rule. In this sense representative electoral
political systems are “merely formal”: real power is never at stake in
elections, and as we have seen time and again—from Iran to Guatemala and
from Chile to Egypt—the poor can never capture political power through
the ballot box alone.

The widespread recognition of this fact accounts for democracy’s
diminished prestige in places like Russia and Armenia today. Among the
opposition leaders in Yerevan there are ambitious men, would-be saviors,
who offer nothing more than a return to the disastrous policies of the
first post-Soviet administration. Despite their best efforts and their
personal fortunes, these personalities have failed to capture the
imagination of the public. When the “democratic” opposition fails to
gain support against an unpopular administration, the disillusionment is
complete.

The Danger of Disillusionment

But disillusionment with “democracy” poses its own dangers. When the
prescribed version of democracy fails to perform its legitimating
function, ruling classes, or factions of them, have time and again
adopted anti-democratic methods of control, by state institutions as
well as non-state ones. Europeans witnessed this process eighty years
ago in Germany, Italy and then again twenty-five years ago in places
like Croatia, Kosovo, and a dozen locales in the former Warsaw Pact
countries.

More recently, in Georgia, Central Asia, Ukraine, and half a dozen
other former Soviet locales, anti-democratic regimes have stepped in to
save the day for capitalist rule, in the face of widespread
dissatisfaction with democratic capitalist regimes. In times of rising
anger, it is child’s play for capitalist rulers to blame their own
democratic institutions for the problems that their economic system
created. When widespread disaffection with democracy sweeps a country,
the first horse out of the gate is fascism. And job number one for
fascism is to terrorize workers—the very social force that holds out the
best long-term hope for countries like Armenia.

Deepening economic crises and mounting social conflict could lead to
greater and greater repression in Armenia, too. Until Armenia has a
mass-based democratic opposition that has built a sustainable
institutional presence on the ground and that presents a realistic way
forward, the country could face the damaging political upheaval and the
pointless radicalism that has been so disastrous in Georgia, Ukraine,
and elsewhere.

The debacle in the name of democracy in the former Soviet Union could
not have taught a clearer lesson if it had been scripted by a Disney
screenwriter: elections in Russia and Armenia show that democracy, at
least the version operating in Russia and Armenia these days, functions
to legitimate the rule of oligarchs and their foreign benefactors over
everyone else. So far, elections have served as little more than a
scrim hiding the dictatorship of capitalists as a class and legitimizing
its monopoly of power. If people have been convinced that democracy
consists of little more than casting futile votes in fixed elections,
then the stage is set for demagogues of the strongman variety to step in
to save capitalist rule.

But democracy--at least some form of it--can do more than just
legitimize plutocracy. In the next installment of this series, we will
consider a couple other functions of democracy, conceived more broadly
and taken more seriously.

Democracy, or rather liberal democracy, advertises itself as a
system of government in which individual rights prevail, but more
accuratelyit is the name given to various political systems in which the
“consent of the governed” legitimizes the political monopoly of
capitalists as a class. As it turns out, though, there is an
alternative model of democracy for a system that could actually benefit
the majority population of the country. To see what this alternative
model could bring, we should first take a closer look at the limited
sort of democracy that prevails in places like Armenia today.

The Market Model of Democracy

Western agencies prescribe a certain model of democracy for
vulnerable countries like Armenia, namely, “the market model of
democracy.” According to this model, democratic participation is an act
of separate individuals, each with his or her own pre-given
preferences. It is the job of a democratic systemmerely toregister
these individual preferences and pile them together, to determine
policy, legislation, and candidate choice. That is the official story. In actuality, this version of democracy
has a lot to do with WHAT KINDS of preferences it registers; but that is
another discussion for another time. The point to stress here is that
for most of the population, the decisive political act is voting, which is little more than choosing this or thatpre-selected candidate.

Like shopping,then, democracyis supposed to be another way for individuals to pursue theirprivateinterests.
American-funded economics textbooksexplicitly connect democracy to
shopping, though in a typically backwards and one-sided manner:
consumer choice, they say, is “economic democracy,” and shopping amounts
to casting votes for and against goods and services. My decision to
vote for candidate A over candidate B is all about which of them is
likely to serve my private needs and the private needs of my most
immediate family. Customers are voters, and voters are customers;
candidates are would-be service providers, and electoral campaigns are
advertising campaigns.

Liberal democracy characteristically appeals to self-interest
narrowly conceived, rather than a collective good. In this view, the
goal of democratic politics is the optimal compromise among private
interests. Back-and-forth haggling in the market of democracy produces
diminished expectations, cynicism, and the priceless lesson that the
rich will always be in power. The resulting low voter turnout and
limited participation--an effect of the system--further strengthens that
very system by constricting the range of choices and destroying hope
for real change. Thus, the market model of democracy reduces
participation of a large part of the electorate, usually without
compromising its legitimacy.

And yet in Armenia as elsewhere, candidates and politicians still
know that they can advance their interests by conjuring “the will of the
people,” “national interests,” and various flavors of nationalism.
Collective ideals die hard, even in a country where the electorate is
exhausted and disillusioned.

The market model of democracy could only prevail in Armenia by doing
violence to deeply held traditional assumptions and motifs that
emphasize the broader welfare of the neighborhood, the town or village,
and “the people.” Our older compatriots, women and men who lived
longest within the Soviet order, could tell us this, if we would for a
moment listen to what they have to say instead of constantly denigrating
their lives and ideals.

Armenians are understandably angry about bribery, ballotstuffing,
back-room deals, fraud, and other “irregularities” of the election
process in their country. It is surprising that the most brazen of
these “irregularities” have persisted for so many years. Perhaps
Armenia’s plutocrats have made the mistake of assuming that the coming
generation will remain as docile in the face of theirdepravities as
thecounterrevolutionary generation has been. In any case,
patronage,back-room haggling, and the manipulation of the electorateare
natural expressions of a liberal democratic political culture in which
public institutions are, at best, just service providers for
customer-voters.

“Political scientists” in the West have long acknowledged this. In his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(first published in 1942), for example, the Austrian economist Joseph
Schumpeter argued that the electorate is inveterately ignorant and
easily manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. Instead of the
“rule of the people,” Schumpeter argued that democracy is—and should
be--a mechanism whereby leaders compete for influence the way private
companies compete for business. Although periodic elections legitimize
governments and keep them accountable, the participatory role of
individuals is severely limited, and the policy program is—and should
be--very much in the hands of an elite leadership.Schumpeter’s views are
influential among academics in the West, but for obvious reasons
Western propagandists do not showcase these views. They have convinced
us to accept what they themselves do not really believe, namely, that
liberal democracy is all about popular sovereignty, and that elite
leadership was the sole province of non liberal-democratic states, such
as the old Soviet Union.

In the absence of a robust conception of the greater good, what
remains of public office aside from payment for services rendered? If
the pursuit of private interests is job number one in politics as in
daily life, thenit is not surprising that politicians, bureaucrats, and
even traffic cops should view their “customers” as a source of
income.This cautionary observation applies to the liberal opposition
groups in Yerevan today just as much as it does to the current
government that they denounce.

Indignation is growing, though, and it is likely that in the coming
years the most blatant of the“irregularities”will disappear, as it
becomes clear that continued abuses threaten to undermine the political
legitimacy of the regime. But even at that, the country’s electoral
politics and official political culture will remain every bit as
limited, one-sided, and rigged in favor of the candidates of the
plutocracy.

If the market model of democracy is the only game in town, then aside
from the “irregularities,” Armenia today already has a rather pure form
of liberal democracy. And even when it comes to corruption, it is not
clear that it is worse in Yerevan today than it was in, say, theUnited
States of America (that self-imagined paragon of liberal democratic
rectitude)during the Gilded Age. The pro-Western liberal democratic
opposition in Yerevan really does not have much to complain about--or at
least they do not have solutions for the problems that they identify,
because they do not provide a genuine alternative.

Democracy and the Common Good

As it turns out, there is an alternativeconception of democracy, one
in which democratic institutions open up a public space for discussion
ofcollective interests, instead of exclusively private interests.
Within this public space, or forum, open discussion and debate transform
personal preferences, creating new conceptions of the greater good.

Open debate discourages the public expression of blatantly
self-serving preferences.In open debate, if a party with narrowly
self-serving aims does not castits proposals in terms of public
good,then it risks losing the debate. Itsself-serving arguments will
come up against counterarguments, whether self-serving or not. Before a
mining company can buy votes for politicianswho will look the other way
when it dumps waste water into a river, the corporation’s mouthpieces
will have to come to the forum with arguments, strong or weak, to the
effect that their preferred candidate will pursue the greater good.
They will have to change the minds of voters, by making the casethat
their “market solution” actually will redound to the benefit of more
people. Environmentalists, local residents, and farmerswill come to the
forum with a different perspective, presenting their own arguments to
make the opposing case.

The forum, then, will function very differently from the market.
Rather than merely registering pre-given preferences and then pretending
to come up with a compromise, politics would change preferences through
public debate. Rather than merely casting votes for pre-selected
candidates, the decisive political act would beengaging in public debate, with a view to transforming preferences of participants in the broader democratic process.

This alternative model sometimes goes by the name of deliberative democracy.
This model of democracydoes not require the participation of every
citizen in politics. People are different, and many people simply do
not wish to engage in the political process. (In this respect,
political deliberation differs from the market, which requires the
participation of pretty much everyone.) Nevertheless, it is likely to
bring many more into the political process than currently bother with it
under the existing regime. It is certainly the case that deliberative democracy operates, to
greater or lesser degrees, within many contemporary liberal
democracies. In the major examples that come to mind, though,
deliberation is highly constrained and deliberative democracy is
subordinate to the market model.

There are reasons to believe that, in capitalist Armenia today, a new
political culture is taking form, outside of the framework of official
political institutions. To a limited extent, as we know, deliberative
democracyalready exists in Armenia, thanks in large part to the work of
investigative journalists, community and environmental groups,and
consumer advocacy groups, applying external pressure on the political
system. Public deliberation and ground-level activism have scored
victories, at least marginally, against the ruling class. The victories
and near-victories include the closure of polluting mines and rapacious
logging operations, the removal of corrupt magistrates, the prosecution
of cronies, successful protests here and there against evictions and
the privatization of public land; strikes for payment of back wages, and
campaigns against domestic violence, bus fair increases, and repression
of political dissidents. Even within the context of capitalist
political systems, public debate and the activism that comes with it
have forced the windows open and pointed beyond prevailing relations of
domination.

We should keep in mind, though, that what has made these victories
possible was action OUTSIDE of the rigged political system. The lesson
is that if anyone but the plutocrats and their foreign benefactors are
to make themselves heard, then they must apply pressure from below. The
political system itself, whether it calls itself democratic or anything
else, is an obstacle to the power of the working-class majority of
Armenia.

Deliberative democracy alone, then, is not a cure-all. The decisive
difference between a well-functioning deliberative democracy and the
market model of democracy could and should lie in the character of state
institutions themselves: are they committed at the outset to the
political power of the working class majority, rather than a handful of
plutocrats? But a well-functioning deliberative democracy at the level of state
institutions will not simply arrive on the scene of their own accord.
There is no way around considerations of the class character of the
state: if the state is a capitalist state, then every conflict between a
corporation and the greater good will be rigged against the greater
good.

Expanded deliberative democracy could also play a pivotal role within
a future context of workers’ power. Here, unfortunately, the
historical record provides tragic lessons as to what NOT to do. Soviet
leaders, starting with Stalin, failed to make the connection between
democracy and accountability, and this had disastrous effects: in the
absence of democratic oversight, inefficient, brutal, and ultimately
self-defeating policies prolife